Maybe it’s going from years of gigging every weekend to sitting on me Todd for months on end trying not to completely destroy my liver, but there’s something about the lockdown that made me desperate to connect with other musicians again.
So I started some shit.
Since everything I’ve recorded recently has been dominated by electric bass guitar I decided for a change to put my upright to use and came up with the blueprint of a tune I could send to a few of my musical acquaintances for them to elaborate on.
I recorded a quick improvised bassline around the ideas shown above and sent it over to Moz who provided a proper tasty soundscape guitar part.
Hearing it back made me rethink my original bassline as it needed something a bit more melodic to compliment the sparseness of the new harmony.
The third addition was percussion from Timney who ran it in a completely new direction with crazy prog rock inspired rhythms on the electric kit meaning I had to further hone in with my final bass part to accent some of the decorations he’d generously included.
Bernie Christie supplied vocals that provided a really interesting conceptual theme which she describes here.
Since the solitude of lockdown had me desperate for musical interaction I felt the need to add a contrasting vocal part of my own after hearing Bernie’s offering and spent a few days experimenting before settling on some good old spoken word poetry.
After recording the previous album in complete isolation this has reminded me of the beauty of interaction between musicians, and why I got hooked on jamming in the first place many years ago.
Every step of the way it’s a surprise and through the contributions of your bandmates you get a small insight into them as artists and how they differ from you, but ultimately how the differences of each can compliment each other – one of the many ways that music can be used as a model to fix absolutely fucking everything.
Groovebox Adam 