Category: Songs

Yet another album: Brookland Voices

I know it’s hardly five minutes since the last album, but I’ve actually been working on this one since last year.

Brookland Voices album cover

Brookland Voices started as another vaguely folky album, but somehow Messrs Yeats (subsequently moved to the ‘Swan Songs’ album) and Housman elbowed their way in. Then I found myself with all these improvised or semi-improvised guitar pieces, some of them played on electric rather than acoustic guitar, and they do seem to dominate the album. In fact, while I would never claim to be any sort of jazz guitarist, this is probably as near to a jazz album as I’ll ever get. To be fair, ‘South Wind’ and ‘The Water is Wide’ are instrumental versions of traditional songs/tunes.

‘Severn Years In The Sand’ is a version of a song that seems to have arisen during World War II among units that saw service in the Middle East. ‘The Knocker Up’ and ‘It Ain’t Gonna Rain are actual folk songs. ‘When I Was In Love With You’, ‘Far In A Western Brookland’, ‘When I Was One-And-Twenty’ and ‘Blue Remembered Hills’ are settings of verse by Housman. The song ‘A Rainy Day Blues’ and the other instrumentals are my own, including ‘Chivalry’, which is an instrumental based on my own ‘Song of Chivalry’.

A Rainy Day Blues

I’ve put this up before, but this is a version with electric guitar that I quite like. More jazz than blues, perhaps: I even played it on an archtop guitar.

Some days are like a melody
But I can’t seem to hold the key
I don’t mind losing
I just wish I had a little more to lose

So I spend my day trying to keep  myself amused
Sitting here picking at a rainy day blues
I don’t mind losing
I just wish I had a little more to lose

It seems the road to fortune never ends
You play God all week and golf at weekends
I don’t mind losing
I just wish I had a little more to lose

And if we quit the rat-race we could have a ball
But you know those big wheels grind so small
I don’t mind losing
I just wish I had a little more to lose

You say you love me but it seems sometimes
You stuff my mouth with kisses and my ears with lies
I don’t mind losing
I just wish I had a little more to lose

Backup:

New album ‘Swan Songs’

Swan Songs

Album cover

1. Ten Percent Blues 03:42
2. The Road 03:34
3. Marking Time 01:38
4. This Guitar Just Plays The Blues 02:49
5. The Last Musketeer 02:31
6. Orpheus with his Loot 02:27
7. What Do I Do (About You) 02:05
8. Rain 03:43
9. Paper City 05:46
10. Snowbird 04:44
11. Swift Variations 02:11
12. The Wild Swans at Coole 06:17
13. Cornish Ghosts 03:49
14. Hilltop Snapshots 03:38
15. The Road to Frenchman’s Creek 02:52
16. Song of Chivalry 03:58

In early 2023 an awkward medical condition brought it home to me that perhaps it was time to draw a line under any pretensions I have to live performance, so my appearance at the Lafrowda festival in St. Just on the 15th July marked a semi-official farewell to the live stage, not that I’ve played publicly much in recent years anyway. This album is drawn from the set list for that appearance, so it takes the form (mostly) of reinterpretations of familiar (to me, anyway) material rather than new songs.

I can’t promise that I’ll never be inflicted upon a live audience again (sorry!), and I’m certainly not promising that I’ll never record or write anything else, but this is, I suppose, an end to any thoughts I had of resuming my career as a professional musician when I retired from the IT industry in 2019.

Lyrics to ‘Marking Time’ by Fiona Freeman. Lyric to ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ by W.B. Yeats. Other lyrics and all melodies by David Harley, as are all vocals and instruments.