Music

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.
(Attributed to George Bernard Shaw in Wikiquote)

On My Way
I got the inkling of a musical idea for this song from a concert I heard in Tokyo by excellent Swedish folk trio Frifot in late 2003 or early 2004. It was the first time I had heard a Mandola with its sharp tone cluttered with doubled strings tuned to rich fifths. I found myself trying to evoke something of the mandola's sound on my ordinary acoustic six-string guitar by tuning it to popular open tuning DADGAD, mounting a capo on the third or fourth fret, and strumming two strings at a time with the thing I use that is a cross between a flatpick and a thumbpick. I also threw in a motif played by frailing the wound strings to create a metalic clang. The result sounds nothing like Swedish folk music but is very distinctive. I wanted to evoke the restless spirit that drives people to pack up their lives and travel. Nigel and I recorded the song in his flat in Kamakura in 2004 just before I left Japan. It was a hurried session in which we tried to lay down quick tracks just to document the tunes we had been working on together. Nigel took away the rough recording and turned a sows ear into... well, something unrecognisably improved by some lovely improvised harmonies in overdub vocal and no doubt a lot of patient mixing on his 8-track!

My Place
Another song from around the same time. This one expresses the other side of the coin: the need to go home and find a place that you treasure, both within and without. Sweet gentle arpeggiated suspended 2nds to lull you off to sleep...