Pete Atkin
MV Deity
Posts: 508
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Songbook Volume 2
« : 18.09.22 at 13:05 » |
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I have recently dropped a few hints and indications that I've been recording again in the past month or two, so I hope it's not teasing you too much to be letting you know some of the details here.
It started in the spring when Simon Wallace and I decided that we should perhaps record some of the versions of some of the songs which we've been working on for our gigs at the Pheasantry over the past year or two - or three. As you'll know if you've been able to witness us in action, it's not that we've been attempting to transform some of the old favourites into pointlessly unrecognisable travesties, rather that we've made a few changes - tempos, rhythms, keys - that have helped us to keep them fresh for you as well as for us; in some ways to treat them almost as if they were new songs.
The short version is that when we'd done maybe a couple of dozen of these mainly piano-and-voice demos, we started to say to ourselves that we should maybe add a bit of bass to some of them. And maybe a bit of drums. And a bit of electric guitar might be good on this one or that one. And so that's kind of what happened, which led to the realisation that what we were doing was making an album.
The list of those demos was too long to make a practical album (and I didn't want go beyond a single CDsworth), so some songs began to be dropped, including some that may well be considered to be good ol' favourites. The main reason for a song not making it to the final working list was that, often after several different tries, we couldn't find a way of doing them that was anything more than an attempt to preserve the old version, and, for better or worse, I decided that although this album will in many ways be a follow-up to Midnight Voices, I wanted to take a different approach: to treat this as a new album - not to try to pretend that these are new songs (one or two of them are very old indeed) but to try to present them as if for listeners who have never heard any of them before. I expect I'm making that sound as if I don't care about those of you - by far the most important section of my audience, let's face it - who have heard them (or at least most of them) before; that certainly isn't the case, and I'll be hoping always that you'll end up thinking that what we've been doing has been worth while. (I'm pretty certain that if I'd gone ahead and re-recorded those old favourites that we dropped from the list, the result would always have been disappointing.) I'm sorry this is all a bit merely philosophical and theoretical, but I hope you won't find the results merely philosophical or theoretical.
I think I know what your next question may be: so which songs will be on it? Well, I'm afraid I'm going to hold off that revelation for a moment or several. I we were to have one of those guessing competitions, I'd be willing to bet that no one would end up with a 100% accurate list - not without having cheated, at any rate. Besides, it's still subject to possible changes.
And the next question after that is probably When will it be out? My guess on that is probably some time next spring, but I promise I shall keep you well informed. And with a bit of luck, I should be able to offer you a preview or two, once we've pulled everything into final shape.
There's quite a lot of work still to be done - percussion, vocals, that sort of thing - and as Simon has hit a bit of a busy patch, we'll do our jolly best to fit it all in as best we can, give or take the odd rail strike, of course.
Meanwhile I'll be pleased to try to answer as many questions as I can. I know it's frustrating when you have so little hard information to base them on, but I'll do my best
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