Tuesday 26 January 2010

Once Upon A Time A Song....

I’ve started a new blog, over at: http://onceuponatimeasong.blogspot.com/

I've always been fascinated by juvenilia and baby steps; beginnings, after all, are usually more revealing and certainly less guarded than endings. This new blog is intended as a place for songwriters to discuss their very first forays into composition; from the gory details - title, lyrics, chords, the full pack drill - to less concrete impressions of what they learned from the experience and how they now look back at their earliest scribblings, seen through the prism of years of hindsight and experience.

The first few entires are now up, and I’ll be adding to them regularly. Please go over and have a look and leave a comment. I think it's going to be fascinating...

Killer Confidential

Phew, it’s been a while. Christmas, work, and the vicissitudes of life have got in the way of regular updates. There are some exciting new things coming up, but first an update of stuff that’s already happened in 2010.

In Sunday’s last ever – boo hoo – issue of Observer Music Monthly, I reviewed the new Corinne Bailey Rae album, The Sea, which is a strange old album, at times brilliant and at others the aural equivalent of filing your nails. I also contributed to the American Legends feature, interviewing around 15 of the stars – Ray Davies (Jerry Lee Lewis), Steve Earle (Kris Kristofferson), Charlie Watts (Sonny Rollins) and many more – who agreed to talk about their heroes, all of whom have been photographed over the past twelve months by Jamie-James Medina. You can read their contributions and see the pics by visiting here.

Over at The ArtsDesk, I interview the African-Portuguese singer Mariza, a wonderful vocalist who has done much to bring fado, her country's intensely poetic indigenous music, to the a mass global audience. And finally, I interviewed Fyfe Dangerfield for the Herald. I’ve never been a huge Guillemots fan, but his new solo record, Fly Yellow Moon, is a very nice piece of work indeed.