A review!

A very nice review of Also, He Made the Stars... from Cross Rhythms - point your browser here.

Their 2007 review of Puzzle can be seen here.

:o)

Genre-hopping and a 1* review

I am the proud owner of my very first 1-star review!

You can read it here at Louder Than The Music.

I’d been pre-warned that the reviewer hadn’t really warmed to it, so it was with some trepidation that I clicked the link.

But that quickly melted into amusement as I read through the article - you see, I’m still not quite convinced it’s a review of my work. It is, however, an interesting case study on the preconceptions which accompany different genres.

So, next I headed over to that oracle of all tenuous wisdom: wikipedia, and specifically the ‘New Age music’ article.

An interjection at this point: for some reason, when the reviewer put my CD into iTunes, it labelled up the CD’s genre as ‘New Age’. I don’t know why. On my iTunes it’s labelled ‘Singer/songwriter’, and on the iTunes Music Store it appears to have fallen into the ‘Religious’ category (which isn’t necessarily much of an improvement!)

So, yes, wikipedia. It has two definitions:

“New Age music with an ambient sound that has the explicit purpose of aiding meditation and relaxation, or aiding and enabling various alternative spiritual practices, such as alternative healing, Yoga practise, guided meditation, chakra auditing, and so on.”

Not very me. Although I can see that the first track (an instrumental intro to the album, all of 54 seconds long) might reinforce that view.

“Music which is found in the New Age section of the record store.”

Haha, that’s brilliant! So, basically it’s the “couldn’t figure out where else to put it” category. I can live with that, especially when the other artists and influences mentioned include the likes of Pink Floyd, Mike Oldfield, Brian Eno, Jean-Michel Jarre, and Philip Glass - elements of which you might well find subconsciously incorporated into my music.

I really don’t mind that the reviewer didn’t like it - after all, all art appreciation is subjective. (Around the time of making Puzzle I shared a flat with a heavy metal enthusiast - whilst we could both appreciate the work and skill put into the music the other listened to, we would have never actively chosen to listen to it. Perhaps I need to be more broad-minded.)

But I do mind that the reviewer got so blinded by the New Age thing that they evidently didn’t bother listening to the music. Where are the references to particular lyrics, images or musical bits they liked or disliked? Where’s the discussion of the themes that the artist might be trying to portray? How about even mentioning a particular track by name? Anything? I mean, I enjoy the genius of Scrubs as much as the next man, but what’s it got to do with me? Ah well, can't please everyone...

J

(In the interests of contrast, you might also wish to have a look at this slightly more positive example at New Life From Old, or listen for yourself at DLDown's bandcamp page.)

AHMTS Song by Song 12 - Lilies & Sparrows

listen here

Putting your trust in something or someone is often easier said than done, especially when the person in question is somewhat intangible. This song comes from a beautiful section of something Jesus said to the crowds of people following him, recorded in Matthew 6:25-34. (Part of a larger block of things he said, widely referred to as the Sermon on the Mount - see Matthew 5-7).

 "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?
 "And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."

I think one of the hardest aspects of our human condition is the surrendering of our own plans - after all, who doesn't like to be in control?!

Fiona plays some beautiful saxophone in the background of this one - I love those bends in the last chorus!

Launch gig recording up for free download!

For those of you who missed out, the soundboard recording of the launch gig is now up here.

Most of you will probably want the mp3 files - right-click and hit "download linked file" to download them. (Audiophiles can grab the flac files and expand them to full CD-quality audio.)

Setlist:
Romans 7
Icarus >
Reba Loop Jam
Part Trust
Lilies & Sparrows
Come Awake (David Crowder*Band)
Since 3 Days Ago
Transformers
Economology
Farther Up and Farther In
Puzzle
Starmaker
Angels with Dirty Faces (The Beulah Band)

Happy listening!

p.s. Dan Glover Band?, who opened the evening so tastefully, have a couple of their tracks up here.

AHMTS Song by Song 11 - Starmaker

listen here (and download for free)

The most recently written piece. All the other songs were in place in some form at least, but the album still felt incomplete. It wanted two more things: 1. a title, and 2. a song - for which I already had a semi-formed concept:

I’m quite happy to discuss all sorts of things about God: complicated doctrine and theology and where dinosaurs might fit into the picture and something of what he’s like in a theoretical kind of way, but often pull up short of describing what he actually means to me at a more personal level (even now, I think only one of my songs mentions Jesus by name in the lyrics). So perhaps this one goes a little way towards remedying that.

Then the other week Karl pointed out a little throwaway sentence in Genesis (v1:16b), which says simply “He also made the stars.” Incidentally. By the way. A little side-project because it amused him. Title and punchline wrapped up right there.

From a musical point of view, this one was quite a challenge. The melody, chords and timing worked fine in the verses, but trying to work out just where to put the notes in the mid section and guitar solo was a total git. Now of course, I can’t see what the problem was, but at the time it was just brain-meltingly confusing trying to remember when to start the next phrase. Fun though! - I like 7/8. It was also nice to work on something a little different in sound - it puts me slightly in mind of 90s pop band Dubstar - anyone remember them?

3 Free Single Downloads and Store Update - Physical & Digital

The three single from Also, He Made the Stars... are now available for free download at DLDown's download store - just click the images below.



Also, just wanted to let y'all know that DLDown's physical and digital stores have now been combined into one. Practically this means:

• CD purchases include an immediate download of the album.


• You can preview both the songs and the album artwork before you buy.

Check it out here!

J

You people say the nicest things...

A couple of my blogging friends have kindly taken it upon themselves to include me and my music in their blog posts:

1. There's a smashing review of Also, He Made the Stars... at New Life From Old.

2. There's an equally smashing review of the launch gig (proudly featuring support from Dan Glover Band?, whom you should also check out) at Grace Note Showers.

Muchos thankses.
J

AHMTS Song by Song 9/10 - Hide & Seek/Found You

listen here and here

I think perhaps everyone feels like this sometimes - that lonely feeling of ‘What’s going on? And why have I been left to deal with it on my own?”. It was written more about my relationship with God than anything else, but I think the addition of Lorna’s harmony vocals accentuates the human relationships aspect too.

(For any MBCers: cue hand movements. “...these-way relationships and that-way relationships and the-other-way relationships...” :o) )

I like the feeling of unresolvedness that's left at the end - these things don't always tie up as neatly as it might look like they're going to, or we might like them to.

Launch gig videos

A big thank you to all who made it out to the launch gig on Thursday. Here's a couple of wee videos courtesy of BrunetteKoala:

Dan Glover Band? - One of Two



DLDown - Since 3 Days Ago



More videos coming soon courtesy of the mighty Faramir Chowyunthin Gamgee, hopefully with lovely synced-up soundboard audio...

love,
J

AHMTS Song by Song 8 - The Turning Song

listen here

This is one of the very first songs Tim and I ever wrote, not long after we started jamming together in 2005. This one of course features Mr Buick’s mighty saxophony.

The title came before we had written any of the lyrics: when we were working out the interlocking sax and guitar riffs at the beginning, we just couldn’t keep track of how many times we had played the phrase, and thus how to move to the next section together. Tim hit on the method of turning through 90 degrees each time through the riff, so when he was facing the right direction again we knew we’d done four, hence The Turning Song. Genius! Fortunately, we got a bit better at it than that before we ever played in front of any microphones...

The lyrics sort of fell into place after that - something roughly along the lines of the parable of the lost son. As my old pastor Matthew said (I’m quoting roughly from memory, and he may well have been quoting from someone else): “There’s no good thing I can do to make him love me any more than he does already, and there’s no wrong I can do that will make him love me any less. He loves me because he loves me because he loves me.”

AHMTS Song by Song 7 - Left to My Own Devices

listen here

Nope, not a cover of that Pet Shop Boys one! Though I do have something of an unexplained soft spot for some of their stuff...

I don’t really know what to write for this one...

I guess it’s a reflection of the fact that whilst I find believing the basics of my faith relatively easy, carrying out the implications of that can be much harder. There’s often that sense of ‘I could/should be doing this better’ or ‘there must be more to it than this’.

Then again, we've got to start somewhere, and to want to want to do something could be the first step towards actually wanting to. Which in turn is a step towards actually doing it. Whatever 'it' is.

As you’ll have gathered, I like complicated or layered parts, so for the drum parts I had to hold myself back from doing anything that didn’t fit the monotonous feel of the song.

AHMTS Song by Song 6 - Icarus

listen here

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, sometimes I read a phrase somewhere or hear a line in a song which makes me think ‘nice idea, but they could have developed that so much further... wait, why don’t I do it?’. In this case it was a line from Phish song, The Squirming Coil. I think it’s fair to say that in many of their songs the lyrical content is very much secondary in importance to the intricacies and ebb and flow of the music, and on the whole this one is no exception. However, the lines

“...like Icarus, who had to pay
With melting wax and feathers brown
He tasted it on his way down”

seemed to be crying out for stretching into something more expansive. My favourite songwriting experiences are when the words and music develop simultaneously, and kind of meld together of their own accord. This was one of them. The descending chord sequences in the ‘spiralling down’ and guitar solo sections are a couple I’m particularly fond of.

I’ve been playing Icarus live for a few years now, but I only got round to recording it properly more recently. The outro jam pretty much wrote itself in the studio. Using the loop pedal is a good crowd-pleaser for live performances, but it’s great to be able to multi-track stuff properly on the computer and edit it afterwards. I just think about what each band-member in my imaginary multi-Jo supergroup would be doing in the jam, and do my best to emulate it.

AHMTS Song by Song 5 - Missing

listen here

Written as I was first getting to know my wife, this is about as close as I’m likely to get to a love song.

From another perspective: after coming back from studying up in Aberdeen, there was a lengthy-ish period when I very much missed it - having my bunch of friends around me, sharing Flat 3 with the guys, my church there, and to a lesser extent the place itself. Then one day I realised that I was no longer missing them, despite still loving them very much. There was as much sadness in that realisation as there was in missing those things in the first place.

AHMTS Song by Song 4 - Romans 7

listen here

This is one of the ‘oldies’ (being all of a venerable 3 years old!). Chapter 7 of the book of Romans contains this passage which is one of the most aggravatingly tortuous pieces of discussion I’ve ever come across - and yet it remains one of the few bits of Paul’s writings that I find I can readily identify with, wrestling with the mismatch between our good intentions and our less good inclinations.

After being played live for a while as an acoustic guitar tune for a long time, it was great to be able to give this one the ‘full band’ treatment. Despite not being a drummer myself, I quite enjoy programming the beats and fills. For the drum fills I transcribe an imaginary Carter Beauford doing something improbable.

AHMTS Song by Song 3 - Economology

listen here

The other day, a friend of mine shared a thought along these lines: Your train is just about to pull out of the station, and you are running along the platform trying to catch it before it goes. In your haste, you barge straight into a guy going the other way. He is in your way. Now there’s an arrogant thought: He is in my way! What makes my way any more important than his?

Don Miller puts it eloquently in his book Blue Like Jazz, where he describes coming to the sudden earth-shattering realisation that “everybody is I”. It’s also nicely put in downhere’s excellent song The Problem:

“Everybody's wondering how the world could get this way
If God is good, and how it could be filled with so much pain
It's not the age-old mystery we made it out to be
Yeah, there's a problem with the world
And the problem with the world is me”

My friend went on to ask what it would look like if we went around with the attitude that everyone else’s way was more important than our own - maybe we wouldn’t get where we were going very fast!

I wonder if climate-change-denial will ever be put on the same level as holocaust-denial? Surely it’s an equally bad level of humanity-caused destruction? - just more insidious and with many more to blame. Including me.

AHMTS Song by Song 2 - Since 3 Days Ago

listen here

For this one I had the chord sequence and structure for one verse worked out, and more unusually, a melody... which then sat around for a few weeks doing nothing.

But it seemed too good to waste, so eventually I thought to myself: just pick a good story, put it into your own words and try and fit it into the melody. I’m quite pleased with the result. The bridge was great fun to write and play, and gives the Rick Wakeman influence a suitable outlet! The backing vocals were entertaining too.

And it is a great story. Some of us are weird enough to believe it’s the centrepiece of history.

Also, He Made the Stars... OUT TODAY!

Buy CD here


Listen/Download: DLDown Download Store / iTunes music store / Amazon mp3


Also, He Made the Stars...

...is a collection of revisited old favourites and brand new material. Some of the songs were written before we recorded Puzzle, but had to wait until now to find a place where they fit. Some of them were written specially for this album, and re-wrote themselves even as I was recording them.

This has been my full-time employment over the last few months, so I very much hope you enjoy it. Please let me know your feedback on it - any reviews welcomed!

Over the next few posts, I’ll be telling you a little bit more about each song: sometimes notes on music, recording or songwriting; sometimes an insight into what I was thinking about when I wrote the song. So without further ado...

1. Planetarium

listen here

A little overture. The bass solo reflects the bass lines of a couple of the other songs (I’ll leave you to work out which ones). I like harmonics.

Boxes!

New album is out on Saturday 24th Oct - CDs and downloads! 3 gigs too!

Hear here