Australian singer/songwriter, Stu Larsen, spent all of 2024 in search of solitude. He spent the month of April on the Indonesian island of Bali.

Well, okay, maybe Stu’s time in Bali wasn’t as solitary or isolated as his previous locations but he still managed to come up with a new song.

April 2024

The song is titled Otherside and it’s more upbeat than his previous songs. Stu plays guitar and harmonica and, as the video shows, had time to add some gentle percussion in the form of hand clapping and tapping on a case and a tin can.

Here’s my haiku in response to the song:

lost in Bali
the piglet’s
curly tail

The lyrics in Otherside talk about how we each walk a different path while being ‘all tangled up in this mysterious life’.

In Bali, Stu was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by the Nobel Prize winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez (an appropriate read for someone spending their own year in solitude). The dark and complex story follows many generations of the Buendía family with, as had been foreshadowed, two members of the family finally bearing a child with the tail of a pig.

So, my haiku alludes both to the lyrical theme of being tangled up and lost in life, as well as the literary theme of the inevitability of fate.

Or, ignoring all that, the haiku might just refer to the disorienting sense of being lost and going round in circles!

Enjoy the song.