The First Album

I want to talk about the album - my first album - the first of 5 that I plan to make over the next 3 years.

The working title is: "Once More To The Garden", and rather than be just a collection of unrelated songs, this album has a theme: an "homage" to the counterculture movement of the 1960's.  To explain this, let me begin at the beginning.

During the summer I finally got round to watching the film of the WOODSTOCK festival of 1969. Then I read the book about it by Michael Lang the organizer, then I watched the film again. When it comes to music I'm a little strange, especially for a musician, because I don't listen to music much... I prefer the silence.

I don't collect cd's, I don't own a decent sound-system, I don't turn the radio on, or go to concerts or own an ipod. It's not that I don't hear music - it's playing all around me everywhere I go outside my own house, and it plays in my head constantly... so when I can get silence, I choose it.

But the last few years I've heard a lot of the music that my son has been playing at home. Everything from the old to the new... and I'm getting to hear songs from artists from the 60's that I'd never taken the time to listen to when I was young.
"What's this band?" I ask my son.
"Crosby Stills and Nash!" he calls.
"Oh - they're good!"
"Yep! and they're old like you"...

Through this, and the Woodstock film I've been inspired to actively seek out and listen to the sounds of the 60's: CSNY; Arno Guthrie; Greatfuldead; Joan Baez; and early Dylan... Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen I already knew, and now Nick Drake joins the ranks. I was just too young for the 60's - and my teenage music path took me from Bowie and then onto folk music and Jazz. But those 60's songwriters are an inspiration to me NOW, so it doesn't matter that I missed them back then.

And they inspire me now because their songs had something to say - stories to tell. The times they were a changin'... the counterculture was a significant movement that affected the world and laid down the freedoms we take now for granted. They were times of struggle, of heavy and conflicting opinion. Maybe the youth of that time sit now behind their corporational and governmental desks, fat and square as the authorities they once opposed, but they did bring change and that change was good. But we lost something in that change too... the romance of the stride, the idealistic vision, the naivety, the innocence, the purpose.

The problems of the world have not been entirely solved, but the youth of today have it relatively easy. What is there to rebel against, to protest against? What is there to get really passionate about - so passionate that you want to write the songs that rally the masses together and take to the streets for the cause? What role does song play in today's world? Something to sing along with, to dance to, to romance to, to lift the songwriter up onto a pedestal as idol. Where are the poets and troubadours and the literary heroes? What can songwriters write that hasn't already been written by Joni or Leonard or Dylan.....?

Anyway, all this got me thinking and feeling and reminiscing and bathing in nostalgia -  and this first album will be an "HOMAGE" to the counterculture of the 60's. Not an historical document (way too much to cover), but a personal reflection on and tribute to that romantic and important period in mankind's history (as far as western civilization is concerned) that I regret not having been part of. The closest I ever came is owning a VW camperbus... and watching the Woodstock movie.

So: "Once More To The Garden" - because Joni's lyrics are still very relevant today.