Time in the mud

I'm currently back in Somerset taking a much needed break, the calm before the storm as it were. I'm writing on Firefox and should do-so more often as it checks my spelling as I go along rather than in Safari. Random point, but needs to be said as I'm quite prone to careless spelling mistakes.

My annual Glastonbury trip proved to do the job rather nicely. It rained a lot. It was very, very muddy (no surprise there?) but was just the kind of break I needed. Being my 6th Glasto, I didn't really need to feel like there were many things left to discover there, I didn't even go for the music this time. I would have been happy to wonder around and check out all the random shit that goes on. I wasn't impressed with the line-up either, but once I was there, everything fell into place, musically too.

I found there were a lot of bands that I probably wouldn't have gone out of my way to see, but glad I did. Bjork aside, whom was the only one I really cared about. I saw her a few years ago, but I spent my time there stuck behind a tall gay couple, wishing it was a little louder. Her appearance on the Other Stage made up for all of that and I found myself in a total trance (until they lost the channel on the speaker near us).

There were a lot of other bands who were noteworthy. For example, The Arcade Fire surprised me. I didn't think much of their recordings, but seeing them live has totally converted me, I totally love them now and see what all the fuss is about. On the other hand, I love Patrick Wolf's recordings, but wasn't so impressed with him live. CSS were mighty cool in the rain, Rodrigo y Gabriella blew me away and so did Shirly Bassy and Cold War Kids... I reminded myself that there IS still a lot of great music out there, there's just not a support from the record industries right now while they figure out what the rest of us already know... give us the music and we'll show the support!

On top of that, I spent a lot of time in my Glastonbury Haunt (aka. Lost Vagueness) spending a lot of time with Future Cinema (check out http://www.19-27.co.uk and http://www.futureshorts.com especially) and pole dancers / weddings in the Chapel of Love and Loathing. All of which was well needed.

On Wednesday I return to London and have two days to prepare all 10 final selected demos for live drum recording over two days. Guitars, Bass are close to follow. Vocals, piano and others I still need to organise, but July is going to be utter madness.

I don't care, I'm looking out the window and there is a beautiful sunset over the Quantock hills.

Suddenly, it's all happening!

Finally ordered my Digi003. Farewell to Pro Tools M-Powered soon. You were useful, but I need better D/A converters and pre-amps. I wanted to get a Focusrite ISA pre, but my M-Audio is shite for syncing with external digital devices. That and there were none to be found on eBay.

Looks like I'm going to need it too. I've just been told that I can't use the studios in evenings and weekends, which is the only time I can use the studios. I understand they don't need as much staff, but surely the college could do a 'Mondays and Tuesdays we'll do evenings, Weds-Friday we'll do during the day' or something? I can take some days off work I guess, but don't wanna depend on it. But I won't let it get me down. I'll figure something out.

Drum sessions are booked at Dirty River Studios (http://www.dirtyriver.co.uk) for the 30th June/1st July and I'm in Somerset from Sunday - 27th June. So demos are going to have to be finished pretty darn quick.

So I've put a holt onto writing now. in my panic for lack of time, I went back to many of my original demos and just thought "hey, this is actually quite good" and forcing myself to actually DO something to them. I was very caucious with this because they just seemed to be quite long and not go anywhere. As my elder brother once said, "your songs are a bit Holland, they don't go anywhere. You need to make them a bit more Scotland to become interesting".

So I looked up to the sky and thought to myself:
"What would PJ Harvey do?"

And the voice answered:
"Shorter songs and more powerchords"

After all, I'm not aiming to write anything longer than 45 mins (50 MAX). Songs like "Pull your Fingers Out" and "Dead on Red" are now on my 'Yes' list (see previous post if you're wondering what the hell I'm on about) by cutting at least a minute out of them and just make them concise. Get the hook out, don't milk it then end it. 4 min songs (+/- 30 seconds), on average is reasonable.

If I keep with this, then I'll be submitting 11 tracks (I know I was told 8, but 3 are pretty much finished apart from new vocals and mixing) - but knowing me that'll last until I get back from holiday and want to write like 5 more demos. At this moment, I think I should keep with what I got and what I got will be awesome if I spend the right time on it.

Back... but for how long?

And now I am back online, I have 16 demos to work with: the amount I originally aimed for. I've been working on two songs, one previously mentioned and another yesterday - which strangely was the first song concept I came up with for this album called 'Get It Right'. I wrote it on Barra de Lagoa beach in Florianopolis (Ilha de Santa Catarina, Brazil.. I'll just keep on flashing foreign names to make this seem more interesting) but never got round to trying to write it properly. Now I'm nearly there.

I've listened back to all of my current demos and created a "Yes, No, Maybe" list of songs to include or forget all together. "Maybes" will be songs I'll include if they develop further. In general, this is very much going to be a pop-record, based on rhythms and hooks, with lots of distortion and guitars for good measure. Some songs are almost the opposite and suddenly go for a very 'live' sound.

I'm still hoping to write another couple of demos, as listening back to the 'Yes' and 'Maybe' tracks, I'm kinda worried there's a lack of consistency here and at the same time, worried some of it is just too samey, but I'm fairly confident that I can string together a good album. I'm hoping to record some guitars for more developped tracks with Alan Webb over the coming week (or failing that, when I return from Glastonbury) and we'll see how it all goes from there.

Time to buy a decent pre-amp for home recordings.

And so it begins

I literally have minutes to type this. I have no internet at the house, and knowing our ISP, we could wait another two weeks before being reconnected, which I'm not looking forward to. Still, this could be a blessing in disguise as I managed to write another song all of yesterday without the distractions of the net. I think it's pretty good. Tomorrow I might not, but I have to keep on writing for the next couple of weeks to have a choice of which will go ahead and which will not.

DifFusion was fantastic. Lots of people came, lots of people seemed to really like it too. That's all I will say on the matter for now. I finished it, I typed it up and handed it in. All good.

I have now finally begun Passion/Aggression, hold tight.