IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE FEBRUARY!!

Some time before the end of today, Ali and I will have worked out what days we are going to start the mixing of Moorscape™. It’s only a week since we finished all fourteen album tracks, yet it feels like an age. It is actually good to take a step back for a while, and I only played my cittern again yesterday for the first time since our last recording session.

We had already ironed out all the small changes to tracks, so for the past week I have been listening through to try and get annoyed with a bit of vocal, a mis-timed strum, a slightly out of tune guitar, or anything else that might need to be improved. Thankfully, there was nothing within the music that jumped out at me as needing to be changed, but I have been uneasy for a while about the different sound we achieve in PEAT, compared to most of the other songs. In the end, I moved it from track 2 to track 5, and now it seems to have found its natural place on the album. It no longer sounds out of place.

And speaking of natural places, Watergrove Reservoir while not natural in itself was built in the 1940s to satisfy the increasing demand for drinking water from the Rochdale and Greater Manchester area. Situated above the village of Wardle to the north east of Rochdale, the reservoir filled the valley that the village of Watergrove once occupied. Watergrove Farm, now the new second track on Moorscape™, was one of the first houses you came to as you entered the village and the first line of the chorus is the name of the last hymn sung in the Wesleyan chapel in Watergrove village before it was inundated.

These days Watergrove is a haven of silence, yet only a few miles distant from the incredibly busy and frequently stationary M62 motorway. The path around the reservoir is an easy walk, and takes a fit person about half an hour to forty minutes to complete. The reservoir is accessible from moorland paths that run between the towns of Whitworth the the west and Littleborough to the east, and there are multiple tracks leading up to the surrounding fells.

Today we were blessed with the kind of weather that you rarely see so early in the year, and almost never in the hills around Rochdale. So it felt like a good decision to take our heads there before we sit in Ali’s studio and start the mix. We are on target for an Easter release, and I now can’t wait to hear the finished article. Then it is for others to judge how good it is.

Waldeaux wander around Watergrove.