Putting Music in Perspective
It’s that “how on earth is it March?” feeling again. It’s been a busy start to the year. There’s possibly a psychological element to the feeling, borne out of the worst weather start to a year I can remember. It simply hasn’t been possible always to do normal outside tasks like tidying up the garden and allotment for the growing season ahead, and life here also changed with the loss of Ozzy the insanely wonderful spaniel just after the turn of the year. No more twice daily walks to his metronome timing routine. So there has been more focus than ever on work that can be done in the dry, within four walls.
At the end of last year I had genuinely decided to hang up my recording boots and focus on live performances, as many as my work schedule will allow. There was no intention to record anything, possibly ever again. I decided it had no purpose after the extraordinarily disappointing sales for works released in the last two years. Few musicians are after megastardom, just a modicum of appreciation will do. Music is probably few walks of life where such a depth and breadth of effort yields such a pitiful return, and with music the opportunities to earn enough to cover costs have contracted to the point where you can’t even give away fantastically-produced, original songs. It isn’t unique to music. It’s a sad fact of life that most art seems now to carry little value in a life that seems mainly to have become about entitlement, the right to have.
So nobody was more surprised than me that a visit to the studio in the middle of January to finish off some of the huge stockpile video work resulted in Ali Karim and I recording and mixing “Breathe”. We couldn’t be bothered with the video stuff, weren’t in a jamming mood, or in the mood for tidying up the audio files for a few of last year’s live projects, so one of the two sets of lyrics I had in my bag turned into a song that has created a different sound in a collaboration that is more affordable. Within the following two recording sessions “Breathe” the single became “Breathe” the EP, and now it is “Breathe” the album, entirely based on the principle of arriving at the studio with just a few sets of lyrics and having at least one mixed song by the end of the recording day.
At the end of last year, I had dreamed up “The Peasants’ Revolt” project. The initial idea was to combine the resources of a number of musicians in producing a truly collaborative work, where we all play on each other’s songs with a theme of the lost history of rural England, which, apart from archaeological surmise, is almost entirely undocumented. I’ve been involved in many collaborative business projects over the years that have started with a genuine blast of enthusiasm from all involved, but which for a variety of reasons don’t then take the shape you expect. Invariably, most projects become the domain of just a few committed souls. That happens for a whole range of reasons and other priorities in the lives of good people.
In spite of such bumps in the road, “The Peasants’ Revolt” now has its first three songs – with just one so far having been fully recorded. There are now several versions of “Pauper’s Son”: an acoustic cittern track, a folk-urban version in collaboration with Ali Karim, and most delightfully a progressive-folk version where Jo Beth Young added her unique and enchanting mix of vocal and instrumental skills. Jo then raised the bar extremely high with a song of her own that Ali and I are going to work on in a couple of weeks, and in turn I have sent Jo rough video version of a new song “Wharram” for further innovative ideas and input. It feels good. It feels right.
And then some wonderful things happened: life changing things that have both nothing and everything to do with music. On 26th February, Ali Karim and his partner Imani welcomed a new baby son into the world. I have witnessed this guy experience some difficult times in the last few years, so to see him settling into family life is a true privilege. A few weeks earlier, my daughter Jenny and partner Phiz sent us a postcard from their Scottish Landmark Trust holiday to inform us that we are to be grandparents. Only my children have the ability to render me utterly speechless, and this was another of those amazing moments. The first scan revealed that Jen and Phiz are going to be parents to twins, which means also that Duncan is going to be an uncle. Twins. Astonishing.
So the music projects, both recording and live, have a new, welcome family theme, which makes it entirely possible that “Breathe” may become a much happier work than my previous output. May. There is of course plenty of reason to continue to produce songs of protest, but suddenly “Breathe” feels much more appropriate as a break from the all the things that you can’t control in life in favour of a focus on the things that really matter. So it may already be March, but this feels like a very good way to begin a new decade.
Here are the first two songs from “Breathe”: https://johnreed.bandcamp.com/album/breathe-album-preview
John