I’m currently writing to you sat in the devastation of my living room; pillows are stacked on the sofa up to the ceiling, fluffy coats and scarves are hanging off photo frames, and my broken bedroom door is propped up against the TV stand, also adorned with blankets and other sound-absorbing materials.
Fret not, I haven’t had a manic episode. The Waxwings and I have been recording a few songs at Humm Studios recently, and we managed to get everything we needed except backing vocals – hence the ad hoc home studio. We just finished the last of them today, so once I’m done writing this I will set about recovering our living room’s lost Feng Shui.
Earlier in the Summer you may have heard me boldly proclaiming that you’d hear a new EP… in July. Those tracks did exist; we’d pieced them together over many months, recording in different studios and bedrooms as far back as November last year. But over that time the Waxwings and I took shape and the songs arrangements improved in-turn, so those old recordings weren’t at all representative of the best they could be. It was a painful thing to realise, but I knew the best way forward was incidentally the most fun – get all of us together in a great studio with a top producer and start from scratch, hammering the tracks out across a couple days (aside from the backing vocals, much to the detriment of my house).
I’m glad to say that was the right call. The songs still need mixing and mastering but even in their raw form they already sound like the real deal. I’m so excited for you to hear them. We’ve got another day booked in a couple months time to finish a third track too. They’ll be a series of singles rather than an EP, released a month apart from each other starting in a few weeks; a song conveyer belt right through to January 2027.
Hitting the reset button on our recordings got me thinking about how I approach other things. This blog, for example, has always awkwardly been both a space for news and creative writing pursuits, the latter of which I find far easier and more fun to write. Trouble is with putting updates here is and I can’t guarantee my posts will find everyone when I share them on socials. Plus they don’t lend themselves to this kind of prose writing anyway.
So, at the beginning of August I started a newsletter, sent via email. You can subscribe here for all the latest hot goss. There’s even an archive of all the old editions if you fancy catching up or re-reading on an incredibly dull day.
As for the blog, it’s now freed up to be more focused; arty things rather facts. Makes more sense right? From here on expect lots of thoughts and feelings, music and movie talk, probably more poetry, and maybe even another post about my morning routine. You lucky devils.
Of course I’ll still end up writing about bigger news here if it takes my fancy i.e. The Underdog Grand Final, but I’ll save everything else for the newsletter.
Now we come back to my living room, which also needs a revamp. Looking out the window it seems our familiar shade of UK grey has returned. But after being scorched for months on end I’m sure some of you will agree it’s quite welcome. Everything’s moving in the right direction.
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