The first reviews are coming in for Warpsichord which came out on Friday.
MOstly they have been good, one magazine did a nice bit on it, an Irish Radio Station and the Irish newspaper have been less kind, but still warm. I want to say that it's like sending your children out into the world but it's not like that at all. I have lived with these songs for a long time now, sometimes I forget bits of them or forget the meaning behind a lyric or how I made a certain arrangement and I have to go back and remind myself through the reopening of files or the rereading of diaries.
I'm really glad that it is out now because it has allowed me to divorce from it entirely now. This may sound a negative attitude, but I don't think it is really. As I said, Warpsichord took a long time to come to term, it's gestation stretching over nearly two years from initial writing to release and in that time I did come to feel shackled to it. Performing the same songs at shows, listening to them over and over during the mix and speaking to people about them, I think i had a version of post natal dysphoria. I needed a hefty dialysis and certain events towards the end of this year have allowed me to put it in the ground, not in burial but in the hopes that it might grow unattended. And actually, this funereal action has reinvigorated my interest in the project. I can talk about it with some distance now, listening to the songs from an outsiders viewpoint.
And I never want to hear the Captain America Video again. We listened to it about a million times when shooting the video and i have anxiety when i hear those chords now.
So, the next step in the marathon for this album is the release of the second official, but third unofficial single. This is going to be Green Tea, and I have some remixes in the works for this by some of my favourite people. There are to be some new songs for B-Sides as well. There will be a fourth, but i don't want to say what it is yet. Two videos are in the pipeline, made by some brilliant directors and I'm excited about them.
Work is underway on the new album too. It has about three different titles at the moment, two are strong possibilities. It may end up with a dual title in the Shakespearean fashion, and at the rate the songs are being born it may very well end up as a double album.
I'm reading my old favourite again, Mrs Carter, and I'm enjoying how her potency is bleeding through into my lyrics. Things have gone very dark for me recently, musically and lyrically speaking and I feel like much more of a narrator at this point than a protagonist. I think this time around the stories are going to be a little bit more magical and less reality-based. I'm revisiting old songs and turning them upside down to view them from underneath. It can be quite enlightening to analyze an old set of words and write an answer to them years down the line. I'm a much different person to who I was when I began writing, and while I'm not sure if this is a positive increment; it's certainly significant.
What I would like to do is take the first album and place it at the end of a long range telescope, far into the galaxy, spinning at a million miles an minute until an aureole forms, and then take parts of the halo and respin them. These new webs will form the second album, the darker echos from the edges of it's grandstanding older/younger brother. Pretentious, I know, but I also know that this is what I want.
If you haven't bought the first record, then I hope that you do. I want to make the next one as interesting as I can for you.
