2024: 12 Songs
at the start of 2024 i knew i needed to refocus on my own songwriting and recording, so I commited to record and release one song every month that year.
song 1: Old days
Written after attending a spontaneous fire on the night of the winter solstice 2023.
Old Days is a celebration of that fire, of connection, ritual, continuity, grief and life. It is a song that aims to remind us not to forget the important people and ways of being from the past as we head into the future.
When it's dark (literally or figuratively) it can be hard to step outside and do the things that help us. The song pays tribute to people whose creative invitations and acts of kindness give us a way to shift perspective.
The artwork was created by the host of the fire, Beth Smith. A vivid, dense collage of water, earth, flames, air, leaves, nature, stones, ripples, light, shadows, time, movement and stillness.
song 2: night lights
Originally written in a photo shoot with Tereza (see Written Portraits and the blog), Night Lights is a uncharacteristically optimistic song as far my catalogue goes.
The voice note in the intro is me capturing the essential ideas whilst talking to her about how we have to come to terms with losing sparks of inspiration (melodies for me, photographs for her). Ideas will get lost. Mornings shift to afternoons which submit to evenings that fade to night. Memories can disappear. But a new day will come.
song 3: Dance On The Demons
This song is a collaboration with poet @rachelhelena who shared a poem in an Instagram story back in September 2022. Sometimes when I read a poem the lines seems to have music in them and a song emerges without any effort at all. I wrote a demo and shared it with Rachel, hoping she wouldn't mind. Rachel often shares work and uses Instagram as a means to collaborate, so it felt natural to run with the creative instinct. I hope this song inspires folks to reach out and collaborate if an idea is there.
song 4: I Said Hot Words To God
Written in distant collaboration with E. Howard Harris, a poet from Swansea who was my Nan's Uncle. Since she shared a collection of his writing with me I keep returning to his work and finding songs in the lines and ideas. It is wonderful to find lines and ideas written by someone a hundred years ago that resonate with what I experience in my life.
Find out more about my work with Harris’ poems in the Singing Seas portfolio page.