And it has landed, my new record. It's hard to explain the excitement of seeing a project through from start to finish. I often wonder if all artists feel the same? There are many battles getting to this point - especially the songs left out. I have some which I will now have to record separately - next project I guess. Of course that is if I can get over the 'impostor syndrome' - which is another artistic condition. Will anyone like it; it's rubbish why will anyone like; I'll cancel the launch because no one will come anyway... sounds a bit crazy I know but its an honest assessment when completing an artistic effort. If you would like to hear the first track just click on here - just me and my guitar in a single take, can't get any simpler: Fairground

Fairground: Brighton’s seafront (where I live now) offers an amazing juxtaposition between the carnivalesque Palace Pier and the crumbling wreck of the West Pier, where the endless possibilities of a fickle world become compressed in the smell, the sound, the sight and the invitation to take the plunge into a wild swim of life. Composed during the Covid lockdown period when the streets and beach were empty, the song is about confronting the fragility of health and well-being – and the cure and solace that love and friendship can bring to a troubled soul - well that's how it felt at the time. The ghost train’s asleep, there’s no lights on the carousel and the fairground’s been closed all year...

Notes from a notebook # 3

It's Burns night tonight. I don't celebrate it much these days, just take time out to read a bit of his work.  And what a lot of it there is. Prolific doesn't cover the breadth of it - and all the more remarkable for the fact that he worked hard and died poor and young. But it takes me hame if I had a hame tae go back tae. I remember singing his songs as a boy in the classroom and it is what turned me onto words, the way words matter. This paen to Nancy who he will kiss then sever their love ' 'But to see her was to love her...' and they, '...lov'd sae kindly,' well it works for me. Happy Burns Night. There are many great versions but this one with Karen Matheson wi' Paul Brady on the Transatlantic Sessions is pretty sublime. Look out too for Jerry Douglas and Ally Bain - written in 1791, imagine. I am about to release Lingerwood  - I took great care on the lyrics before committing them to the record and equally, I hope I have sung from the heart (which seems to be the way of my songwriting these days - here's tae us, wha's like us:

Notes from a notebook #2

In my last post I referred to clearing  up my shelves and desk before preparing the release of my new record, Lingerwood, but I failed. The simple reason is the bloomin' notebooks. Decades worth which chart a life I couldn't seem to recognise. I mean every one is dated and has my handwriting to confirm they belong to me but can I remember writing half of that stuff down? Nope! I can remember writing this one (picture left) though because it became the bridge in a song which you can hear here: Icarus Over the Forth (engineered and produced by Phil Jones for Long Way Home Music). I would be happy to explain the song if I really knew what it was about but the truth is I keep changing my mind. It's a patchwork quilt of a song, made up of its pieces and each of those pieces is a feeling of connectedness to my past, about not being able to leave the past behind because its tattooed onto my skin. But sometimes songs are a bit like that. I am about to release Lingerwood and the album too is a patchwork of my life and ideas, full of quixotic echoes, or maybe that should be chimeras. The Icarus song though is on the Fisherrow album and it's one I love playing live. So here's a live version recorded for Portslade Railway Roots Club during the time of covid - the intro gives away the fact we were recording for the online shows Robb Johnson ran (and he still runs the club on the first Thursday of every month except August) which everyone should come to, if they can.

Notes from a notebook #1

Trying to clear up my shelves and desk to start the new year is a fateful business because I can't bear to throw things away. The never know when you will want/need it mantra is pretty futile most of the time. But notebooks are a must keep for everyone, surely? I opened this one at random and these three lines popped out. I was still living in London at the time (East Dulwich, just off Barry Road and walking distance to Peckham Rye and Dulwich Park). I have no idea what the lines refer to, whether it was the start of a new song that never got written or just a random thought. I am posting them here because in some ways they represent a stepping stone in my life because from there on  in my life changed dramatically. But its nice to reflect on reminders such as these as I plan a next move forward. Watch this space because it will include the release of my new record, Lingerwood. In the meantime, maybe you would like to listen to something on the last record, Fisherrow. 

The first track on the record is available here, called Portobello (engineered and produced by Phil Jones for Long Way Home Music) but I'm also posting a little live version I recorded at home for Portslade Railway Roots during the online Covid gigs we did (and the end of the video is a reminder of our isolation). The link between cutting kite strings in 1988 and this song may not be immediately obvious to many, but as the new year begins I am not forgetting my past, nord how lucky I have been getting here, thus far.

 

Route 66 # 7

Picture by Ewan Jones

In other times I travelled north to see the night and day collide in light, where the dark never manages to overtake; the clock on the cabin wall might say midnight but it could have been noon, for the darkness is dispersed elsewhere. I’ve seen the aurora too, between Shetland and Norway, through the porthole of a boat smaller than the trip required; tiny needles of light piercing the glass, a poem puncturing pin holes in the story to let the light in. There was no ship’s cat on board, no purring comfort, just the ringing of the rigging catching the breeze. This could have been a disaster, you said. The weather can change so quickly, we will be lucky if it stays this calm for the whole crossing. It’s coming back that worries me. When the going is good, why go back? I hold that thought close and let the strange time slip by, unjudged.

The picture above was taken by Ewan Jones for Long Way Home Productions and was part of my first ever record company photo shoot. I'm always open to new things, new ways of looking at life and this was certainly that. It got me thinking about John Berger writing Ways of Seeing and what other people see when they see a portrait like this. It's not my portrait, it's Ewan's and I am just the subject. But the poem next to the picture is mine and marrying the two brings its own sense of parallax. John Berger wrote, 

The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.

Each evening we might think we see the sun set, but actually and mostly we take it for granted and assume it does so as we pull the curtains and pour the wine. But as the poem suggests, go far enough north (or south) and there is a time when the sun barely sets at all, and the idea that the 'knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight...' comes to make sense.

I wrote this song very quickly to play at Portslade Railway (virtual) Roots, after 365 days of coronavirus. It had been a whole year and I wanted to tell a story about the kickback from that year. When the world just gets to be too big and the ghosts start moving in, sometimes it's best to take good advice and 'come to bed'.

Route 66 # 6

It's a funny thing but after writing and recording this record and the accompanying book in a quick flurry of creative energy, I only got a chance to reflect on what I was thinking after it was done. Actually, that's how it usually is how it is for me. I read the other day it takes Kazuo Ishiguro over five years to write a novel, so maybe he does the reflecting and mulling over work as he goes along. But that's what I like about songwriting. The immediacy of the form and the temporality is often thrown in the songwriter's face as a criticism but reflecting after the point of writing brings more to say about the moment in which it was conceived. 

    

This isn't actually to say I take it lightly but when I heard Leonard Cohen took years to write Hallelujah and he still wasn't happy, I was trying to consider what he was thinking about. It's not my favourite song, far from even being close, I much prefer the slicker, spontaneous Cohen in some of his less heralded songs (I think it's the internal and external heralding of Hallelujah which turns me off). But I realise now it was the effort to make it epic and deep and meaningful which stripped it of it's vitality. It lacked the immediacy of the cultural moment that writers such as Mitchell, Lennon, Dylan, Reid and Springsteen deliver. But I digress. I have come to realise that one of two things might happen as I write, which influences the rhythm and lyrical patterns. The first is that I write songs intuitively as an internalised, emotional response to something I can't quite figure out, or say out loud and the second is, it's not until later I realise that the tidal tugs which bring the ebb and flow of life events into focus, start to be reflected in what I was trying to say. It's a kind of mixed up, combined idea of analepsis and prolepsis. While I can be writing on a topic like homelessness or social concerns like forced migration or even Amelia Earhart's feminism, the underlying themes also reflect a subconscious concern (if concern is the right word) which I have stored up from past experience. 

Let me try to explain analepsis and prolepsis in this regard, it's less complicated than the words might suggest. Prolepsis is a projection of the future from the present, it's where and what we think the future (even tomorrow) will be, as informed by our past experience while reflecting from the 'now' of our own story. Carol King singing, will you still love me tomorrow isn't really a question but a rhetorical hope that you will. Analepsis, looks back, not forward, at the experience of what went before but which impacts on the 'now'. Childhood experiences, broken love affairs, heartbreak, young love, all the accumulated speedbumps in our life's journey which bring us to who we are. So, Carol King singing, will you still love me tomorrow, is aligned to the simple fact that past experience also says possibly not. Simple huh? When I'm songwriting, echoes of my past inform the lyric as I reach out in the present to where I am going in the future. The whole Fisherrow project is infused with this idea and its only now, after looking back at it, I can see the book and the CD aren't about nostalgia but hope for the future, and the wordplay isn't play at all but actually a voice finding a space to speak. These echoes we hear are our own thoughts, the continuities we carry with us through our lives, even if we don’t own them as anything but vague memories which take us forward.