'Swansongs', my musical dare, is 10!

This month is the 10 year anniversary of writing and recording Swansongs, the solo EP I was challenged to write and record in two weeks with just one microphone.

Looking back, it’s interesting to see what a milestone it was for me, and wonder what I’d do differently now. Up until this point I had no interest in doing my own thing again, not with songs anyway, and definitely not using a piano. I’d been doing some session work here and there which was occasionally proving lucrative, composing toplines for other people’s projects, writing for the now-sadly-missed Lazy Gramophone Press, taking commissions from organisations and ensembles, teaching music at CYM, and playing around with loops and improvisations in my own time. That, in some ways, seemed to be enough for me.

Then a commission came along that changed everything: composing the EP for the play Pawnography for The Rose Theatre, Southbank. I’d turned down a few plays before as having worked on a couple and also a film I believed the mediums weren’t right for me, but the script was so compelling I couldn’t not be a part of it. That play required songs, and I wrote my own material again for the first time in a long time.

I shared those recollections and sudden understanding of why I’d sidelined writing my own songs with a friend, who then set me the challenge. In fact, the challenge included making and releasing an EP a year for ten years. I’ve technically done that. But I’ll save the technicalities of that for another time.

I booked two weeks off work, set my microphone up, turned my phone off, didn’t see anyone in this time, and created the sound palette and desire to create what eventually became my Our Lady of Stars album - giving life to a part of me that had unknowingly died. I took long walks in the park where instead of feeling inspired I stressed about the time pressure of it all and how much easier it might’ve been if I could’ve just improvised something instead.

Would I approach the composition of this work and this challenge differently now? Absolutely. Probably completely. And in so many ways. Maybe I’ll write a then-and-now retrospective on compositional process when I reflect on Swansongs’ release anniversary in November.

For now, I wanted to share it with you, but I’m still changing distributors, and can’t finalise uploading my material to them until Covid restrictions allow me to be in a room with other people again, so there’s no album I can point you towards online (at least, there shouldn’t be!!), but there are two samples on my Bandcamp here. Enjoy! And thank you for not being my swansong, Swansongs.