Through the glass the sweets came tumbling...

Hi everyone,

So I've got my album log out in front of me and it looks like things are beginning to take shape. I took a little break for most of last week to record a new version of a song by my old hardcore band, Elysia, which was a lot of fun but took far longer than I thought it would. It appears these things usually do. Anyway, that was quite successful so at some point I'm going to look into recording the rest of the album we wrote back in 2003.
However, I'm back to my main focus now, which is the new Hailstones record. I've pretty much decided on all the songs that are going on the album (there's 11 in total, and it turns out there's no room for an instrumental) and I've written most of the lyrics to 8 of them. Some of the working titles include "A Bedroom in the City of Light", "Someone Else's Moon" and "Zwarte Piet". I don't really want to give too much away at this stage, as I'm still unsure as to the order of everything and how the album's going to sound as a whole. I probably won't know for sure until I'm done recording it - things usually change a lot during that process. For the time being though, I can say that a few songs have a more mellow feel to them than on "Theodore", with less of an emphasis on epic, and more on structure and melody. Having said that, there is another side of this album that is pretty upbeat, loud, and sometimes quite dark. I'm trying to make sure that there's a big range, basically, but also that there's a cohesion between the songs, either in the melodies or in the lyrics.
A lot has influenced me on this album, and although I try to keep my own style rather than ripping off someone else, I can pinpoint some definite musical muses, especially Nick Cave's "No More Shall We Part", Patrick Wolf's "Wind in the Wires" and of course "Aeroplane", as well as everything by Simon and Garfunkel and everything after "Pet Sounds" by the Beach Boys. Oh and at the moment I'm listening to Pig Destroyer, although I don't think I can really say that grindcore has been a direct influence on my sound...!
In the next week or so, between going to work and watching the first season of the OC again (deal with it), I hope to put some words to the rest of the songs, and then I can start fine tuning the lyrics I already have.

That's all for now. Don't drown.
George

Hold on tight, we're moving!

Well, it looks as if things are finally starting to come together. I began thinking about this album as I was finishing up the recording for "Theodore and the Spectres" during the summer of 2005, and now, almost exactly two years on, I'm only just getting down to writing it. So what took me so long? Well, firstly I went off to university in Exeter, and then I was sent to Vassar college in New York for my second year, and in between that I spent more time than anticipated on a project with Owen Fung that turned into an album called "Sachiko's Seasons", which we are on the verge of releasing under the name Ex-Tap Dancer. These are busy times, to be sure.

But during all these transcontinental shifts and musical sidetracks I've been itching to get another Hailstones record out there. "Theodore" was everything I wanted to achieve at the time, but when I finished it I wanted to move away from my fascination with the 'concept album' and see whether I can actually write straight up songs about personal experiences and feelings, rather than hiding them in fictional stories. So I bought a cheap handheld tape recorder from ebay early on in my first year at Exeter so that I could capture any bits and pieces of guitar lines and vocal melodies that came to me whenever I wanted. That proved to be a pretty useful idea, but by the end of the year I had loads of bits and hardly any that I really thought were good enough to go on an album. Oh, of course I had no lyrics.

So I took some time out, wrote and recorded "Sachiko" with Owen in the summer of '06 (an exercise that allowed us to figure out how to get the best sound from our new Tascam 38, as well as experiment with instrumental music), and went off to America. While there, I picked up a little stereo mic for my iPod so that I didn't have to use that crappy tape player anymore, and got a better idea of the direction I wanted to take the album in. Eventually I began noting down ideas for themes and any lyrics that came to me, and by the time I flew home I had a lot more subject matter, a lot more ideas for songs, and a lot more confidence in this album.

And that pretty much brings us up to today. I have a long bus ride to work every day so I'm keeping myself awake by writing lyrics, and musically the basic song structures are, if very roughly, practically finished. So in the next few weeks I'm going to carry on writing lyrics, arrange a general track listing, and start thinking about how I want each song to sound when it comes to recording. My hope is that I'll finish the album acoustically by the end of the summer so that I can team up with Ian Humberstone of Tisso Lake (with whom I will be sharing a house in October) to record it. Good times.

So in the meantime, I'm going to try and keep this blog updated with where I am in the writing process (I may share some thematic ideas and lyrics etc possibly), and also with links to things that are influencing me at the moment. Plus anything else that I think might be interesting. So do keep checking back, and I'd really welcome any comments or suggestions etc if you're willing to make them. Thanks a lot!

George