I can’t remember how long ago it was when Laura Theis and I first started talking about recording an album together. The basic idea was that we would record a little over half of the tracks with a stripped down band in a studio, and then I would layer in all the rest of the stuff afterwards. That’s generally how I work best, tweaking tracks in small chunks over a long period of time, while working on several projects at once. But it does mean it takes a long long time to complete. It’s probably been about 3 years. But I’m really happy with the result, and I think/hope Laura is too. (more…)
Month: October 2016
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Badass Snow White (track)
Track 2, and the title track, of Badass Snow White. Laura talked about always being frustrated when growing up with how lame and passive and annoying the heroines in fairy tales were. Best encapsulated, perhaps, by the lyrics ‘I’m fed up of lying here in this glass coffin / Always hoping that some prince is gonna come / For when he does I doubt that he’ll be charming / Kissing dead girls is a hobby I find alarming…’
Hopefully this song goes some way to redressing the balance.
No magical mirrors on the wall were smashed in the making of this rhythm track. Or, at least, were smashed by me.
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The Keeper Of The Eddystone Light
Track number 2 from the Reverenzas EP ‘How We Roll’. A tale of religious devotion, maternal love and eaten offspring. Far away on a lighthouse on the Eddystone Rocks. I understand it’s based on a true story.
This song has that unmistakeable feel to me of Music Hall song.
Jamie Huddlestone, who plays melodeon on this track, used to entertain us in rehearsals with tales of how he’d heard people sing this at sessions by dragging out the line “oh for the life on the roooooooooooooooooo…lling sea” for as long as they possibly could. After which he would politely applaud. And then punch them in the face.
Don’t make fun of mermaids, kids.
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‘All The Sad Stories’ by Jessica Law
Second recommendation of the month.
There are a number of musicians I know who are clearly fictional characters. People who you wouldn’t be at all surprised to find have actually been played by actors all along. Jessica Law is definitely one of those.
She was born in the late 1800s, became part of the Midlands contingent of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and then died about 1910. Probably of consumption. And then, thanks to some sinister backroom scientific experiment, was brought back to life and condemned to spend the next 100 years or so walking the earth and singing songs about death and revenge on a resonator ukulele.
Think of her as like The Woman In Black, only every time she appears a child doesn’t die. Instead, a borrowed library book completely disappears from the face of the earth, cursed to never be returned, stamped and reshelved.
Current Favourite Track:
Six Years (“Well I never had the health to ruin myself…”) -
Eulogize This: Suzanne Vega
I try to keep these Eulogize This posts to a maximum of 1,000 words.
I try. And I fail.
http://www.eulogizethis.com/suzanne-vega/
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The Country Is Another Country
I remembered the quote wrong. It’s actually:
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
But it would be wrong to say that the countryside in England is like a foreign country when compared to the cities. That would imply that one of the two is more English than the other. That said, I think it is fair to say that the two are different enough to be different countries.
But, as ever, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Basically, I’m a useless relative. I never go to stuff.
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