Pharmacy studios recording...
For the past year I have been working on a solo project - nurturing, feeding, catalysing, surgicaly stitching lab-style, cutting and pasting, spontaneously birthing a series of songs. Some of these songs have waited in their preserving jars for years: whole creatures waiting to be animated. Others were just sketches, strong motifs and vocal lines needing to be fleshed out. Still others arrived in a burst - whole and fierce and alive.
For the past two months I've been working with talented producer, Richard Andrew of Pharmacy Studio to arrange keys, drums, synth, strings, guitars and occasional ambient sounds that ingratiate themselves then demand to be on the album (short-wave radio, whispered background conversations). We are recording to tape which requires a different kind of attention to the luxury of endless data that digital recording affords. It's a warm, intense and very organic process. I love it. Here's a snippet: some lyrics from one of the songs - Armistice Day
Armistice Day
What we been doing all these years?
We’ve been digging a hole all the way to China
Now your side of the bed’s an Atlantic Ocean crossing from over here
Baby, what were we doing all those years?
What were we thinking when we said those things?
The words that flew like bullets tearing a rent between us
We’ve lost so much ground to no-man’s land that we’re teetering on needles and pins
Baby, What were we thinking when we said those things?
I’m walking away
The white flag has fallen
The battles are over
I’ve nothing to say
That cold war was stupid
The fire got too heated
Thank god and the heavens it’s Armistice Day
What can we do now but grieve our dead?
There’s a lifetime of hope that is buried in trenches between us
And your face is a territory marked with the lines of an enemy in your head
Baby what can we do now but grieve the dead?
I’m walking away
The white flag has fallen
The battles are over
I’ve nothing to say
That cold war was stupid
The fire got too heated
Thank god and the heavens it’s Armistice Day
What do we hold now that love is lost?
Well we hold to the selves who still stand in the face of destruction
Perhaps we’re better people now than the ones who fought the war with all its costs
Maybe we have grown up now that love is lost.
I’m walking away
The white flag has fallen
The battles are over
I’ve nothing to say
That cold war was stupid
The fire got too heated
Thank god and the heavens it’s Armistice Day
