I HAVE SO MANY FRIENDS

Summer is here and all of a sudden I’m about to release an album that I’ve been working at off and on for, well, it feels like forever.

I can’t even remember exactly when Matti Müller, Jonny Gee, Angi Stricker and I first found ourselves in a recording studio in Hildesheim, Germany. Matti had arranged it. He’d promised the help of a recording engineer whom I’m still yet to meet. Instead at the last minute a university student arrived at the studio only to inform us that he didn’t know how to run Cubase, the studio’s operating software. The next day we even managed to lock ourselves out of the studio. I had to jerry-rig a long branch with some kind of hook on it in order to fish the keys off the mixing console.

During the first winter of the pandemic I finally took a stab at mixing the tracks. This was after Matti’s engineer friend had once again disappeared. Despite my own impeccable Luddite credentials I now had to figure out how to transfer all the tracks into Logic, an entirely different recording software. Days of home-schooling my young daughter were followed by steep climbs up the icy and deserted London streets to West Hampstead for solitary late night mixing sessions. I’ve participated at plenty of final mix sessions but I’ve never before been the one at the controls.

To make the whole experience stranger, half the songs on the album are ones I’ve previously recorded, either with my Enemies or with Riley McMahon for our S&M record. Some of those S&M songs were in Riley’s laboratory for such a long time it felt particularly weird to be going back to them. Tunes like Cold Days Of December, Mummy’s Got Strange Friends, Laura Ingraham. Riley’s production was so gorgeous why even revisit the songs in the first place?

The only answer is that this is an unplugged album. Four musicians - four voices, two guitars, double bass, percussion. The song choices were based on the ones we found ourselves playing the most at our European gigs. That includes old Enemies standbys like In The Pouring Rain, Beautiful Monday and Building A Road. Happily, there are a few more recent tunes as well including the title track.

The full album of I Have So Many Friends will be released digitally on August 1st. You can read more about it HERE and pre-order it HERE. Watch the video of the title track HERE.

The summer release takes me to Newcastle for the first time in my life. We’ll play at The Bridge, the second oldest folk club in Britain. We’ll then be back in London for a release party at The Green Note before a journey to the Twinwood Festival in Bedfordshire for three separate sets including one on the main stage in front of thousands vintage music lovers. Check the Gigs page for other summer shows including another debut in Totnes, Devon.

Stay tuned for later dates in Europe and the States…

2022 IN THE REAR VIEW

The year has ended well thanks to some wonderful December shows and to the love and encouragement of friends, fans and Enemies on either side of the Atlantic.

I was particularly nervous before this most recent trip to the US. I had set myself a challenge: to perform the first act of Youngest Child, my new one-man-memoir-in-song, in New York City and also in Belmont MA at what turned out to be an unforgettable concert at Homer House. I had only performed the piece once before - in July at The Green Note Basement in London. It takes a lot of rehearsal and there’s a lot to memorise. And I am not Bruce Springsteen. It could all come across as so much self-indulgence. But, to my great relief, the audiences engaged and responded thanks in large part to the brilliant insights of friend and director Frank Wurzinger who had encouraged me to abandon my comfort zone during two hugely important summer rehearsals. I look forward to performing the full piece in the new year either as two separate acts or as an abridged one act show or both.

Already exhausted and very hoarse I returned to New York for four days of recording in DUMBO. The sessions were guided by Peter Fox, the producer of my very first solo album, Ugly Love. After seven epic albums with my Enemies I had decided it was time for a different sound for a collection of tunes about fatherhood, family and getting older. The basic tracks were cut with Brian Geltner on drums, Drew Hart on bass and my dear friend Kenny White on keyboards. I hope to finish the record some time next year. Still a ways to go.

I thought it might seem strange to go from the recording sessions straight to a couple of shows with the Enemies but the band immediately continued from where we had left off in the spring: two more fantastic gigs in New York and in DC. The audiences were in fine form too. All that was missing was Riley McMahon, our genius lead guitarist. Riley isn’t just a new dad, he’s also been fighting cancer. We hope and pray that he’s turned a corner with his recent treatments. Our love goes out to him and also to Natalie and young Annabel. By a strange coincidence I ran into Amy Rigby, Riley’s sister, as I came back home through Heath Row arrivals. She was waiting with her husband Wreckless Eric for her daughter to arrive from LA. Very small world.

The year also marked the completion of my new unplugged album I Have So Many Friends, a collection of fourteen songs I recorded in Germany with Matti Müller (guitar, vocals), Jonny Gee (double bass, vocals) and Angi Stricker (percussion, vocals). The tracks include old favourites (Building A Road, Beautiful Monday etc.) as well as previously unrecorded songs. I’ll release it somehow somewhere some time next year. Stay tuned.

The life of an artist, like everyone else’s, goes through a series of ebbs and flows. For some inexplicable reason I currently feel more connected to my music than ever, also more connected to the audiences who come to listen. Long may that continue.

Thanks to my Enemies for indulging me for all these years. Thanks to new friends and collaborators for sharing their own unique gifts. Thanks to some amazing hosts - Dan and Maria in Washington DC; Kaye and Lesley and Tricia in Massachusetts; Hans in Holland; Kim and Pilo and Jan in Denmark - for pulling out the stops to create some magical evenings. Thanks to two of my favourite clubs - The Green Note in London and Rockwood Music Hall in NYC - for their reliably excellent support. And thanks to all the audience members who came to listen but who ended up singing along and sharing their energy with the rest of us.

Happy 2023!

JOIN MY PATREON COMMUNITY

So I’ve finally done it. I’ve set up a Patreon page. And I’m excited about it.

In the era of Spotify it’s harder than ever to justify the expense of recording and releasing music. Crowdsourcing has been helpful and I’m very grateful for it but I think Patreon is even better. It’s a subscription service that puts the artist in closer contact with fans and friends alike, an opportunity to share brand new songs and other goodies when they’re still fresh. Believe me, that’s a big motivator for an artist. I usually wait a year or two or three before putting out a collection of songs. For all kinds of silly reasons - perfectionism, business strategy, you name it. Patreon joins the dots and keeps the ball rolling.

Please join me on my adventure! Here’s my Patreon page and here’s my Patreon video pitch!

See you soon in my living room…

NEW YORK MEMORIES

I’m back in London after a whirlwind trip to the States. My first gigs with the band since 2019. My first NYC solo show for as long as I can remember. It was vital to reconnect with friends and Enemies alike. Despite the absence of genius guitarist, Riley McMahon, the band sounded better than ever. They even let me play some of my recent ditties: two or three in New York, seven or eight for the double set in DC.

Miraculously, on the very morning of our last New York rehearsal Riley texted us the news that Natalie was heading to the hospital to give birth. The next day as John, Tim, Kevin and I drove down to DC we received the even better news: Annabel Gray McMahon! Mazel tov!!

The turn-out for all the shows was heartwarming. The reception for the band at Rockwood was so enthusiastic it felt like we could have played Humpty Dumpy seven times and we’d still have been called for an encore. Big thanks to Ken, Matt, Dan, Stephen and all the staff at that wonderful club for inviting us back and providing the context for a beautiful reunion. And thanks to all our friends and fans who came out to support.

Enemy #1 (John Young) ready to rehearse in DUMBO

The show at the deej in Washington DC was equally encouraging. Dan and Maria throw the best house party on the East Coast. This was the first for them since the pandemic. No sign at all they were out of practice. Everyone was ready to hear live music and be amongst friends. Big thanks to Chris Watling and Peter Fox for sitting in (at the last minute) on sax and keyboards respectively. It was also lovely to have Victoria Villalobos join us us for a few songs fresh from her second kidney transplant. Victoria shared many a wonderful night with the band back in the Fez days in the early 2000s and was also part of the gospel choir on our Building A Road album.

Dan and Maria, hosts of the deej in Washington DC

A few hours after the double set I was on a plane to visit my eldest brother Nigel in Minnesota. Nigel suffered a bad stroke several years back. It was great to see him.

My eldest brother Nigel and his wife Connie

So much to process. So good to play music with friends and Enemies alike. Thanks to everyone for the fellowship and the encouragement. Thanks to Peter and Sophia for the NYC hospitality and to Dan and Maria for the same in Washington DC. Most of all, thanks to John Young, Tim Vaill, Candace DeBartolo, Kevin Cordt and Tony Lauria for the resumption of hostilities.

Farewell Manhattan

Trailer for EITHER SIDE OF MIDNIGHT

Okay the film still doesn’t have distro but at least you can see the trailer. Director Roger Spottiswoode needed an upbeat poppy number a la Taylor Swift for a sequence in the middle of the film. I was cheaper. He liked the song so much he put it in the trailer as well. Sung by Bree Sharp and produced by Don DiLego.

BACK TO NORMAL?

It’s over a year and a half since I’ve shared any news here. I wonder why. Ah yes, the pandemic.

I’ve been so much luckier than most. I’ve even been able to enjoy the lockdown at times. Lots of new songs and scripts, plenty of walks, and (mostly!) quality time with my five year old daughter. Enforced home schooling took some getting used to but, luckily for me, my daughter was a good teacher. I might have learned some patience.

Also, the film of my feature script - Either Side Of Midnight - was edited and entered into festivals. I’m still digesting the journey I’ve had with it. I’m simultaneously thrilled the film got made and disappointed with its progress. The producers haven’t yet found a proper distributor. The main reason is that there are no recognisable stars. Still , the director and producers knew that going in. Is the film quite good enough? If not, is that due to some unwanted changes and additions made to my script? Of course, I’m the writer so you already know what I think. Like the narrator of many of my songs I dwell in a limbo of ambivalence. I’m simultaneously frustrated and grateful. Who knows where the journey will lead?

Much as I love films and hope that more of my scripts get made, nothing compares to the catharsis of music. More than anything else I’ve missed the experience of playing my songs with other musicians. I’ve particularly missed rehearsals. Some of my favorite memories are of working on new material with my Enemies. My little ditties suddenly put on a whole new suit of clothes. I can’t believe I haven’t seen the band since late 2019. It’s been far too long.

Thanks to the coming London visit of my good friend, Matti Muller, I’ve booked my first gig since March 2020. I’ll be playing as part of a quintet at The Green Note on Tuesday, August 17th. That’s the largest combo I’ve played with in England: Matti on guitar, Jonny Gee on bass, Joe Bickerstaff on piano, Moonsauce on percussion, and myself on schizo-romantic vocals plus the occasional strum. Rehearsals have been unbelievably therapeutic. Still, I’m weirdly nervous about the show. It’s been so long. Please come and calm me down. It will be… amazing! There are still a small number of tickets left. They need to be purchased in advance for Covid compliance reasons.

Matti Muller, Spott, Jonny Gee
Photo by Clare Elliott

If you live north of London you may prefer to come to The Twinwood Festival near Bedford on Saturday, August 28th. I’ll be playing two very different sets on the Moonshine Glade stage: an acoustic quartet set at 2:15pm and an electric quintet set as The Deadly Lampshades at 4:50pm. For my own safety each set will have an Americana slant in keeping with the flavour of the festival. Otherwise I’ll be lynched by a posse of angry Brits in vintage derby hats.

On the road again. Hope to see y’all soon.

PASTE MAGAZINE VIDEO PREMIERE of HOBOKEN

Paste Magazine has chosen to premiere HOBOKEN, the music video of the first song from the band’s forthcoming seventh record, LOST IN THE CITY.

Shot by Ehud Lazin in lower Manhattan, the camera follows young Spottiswoode as he strolls wistfully to the Hudson River and takes stock of his life.

Read the article and watch the video HERE.

LOST IN THE CITY record release!

The band's seventh record is due for release on iTunes on Tuesday November 27th.

LOST IN THE CITY is our most ambitious song cycle to date, a giddy brew of jazz, chanson, rock, blues and minimalism. The music reflects the raw energy and sophistication of the city the band has called home for the last two decades.

On Friday November 30th we celebrate the record's release and also our 21st anniversary at Joe's Pub in NYC. It will be our first show at the Public Theater since the release of English Dream in 2014. Doors are at 6pm, the show starts at 7pm. Find your tickets HERE. Alas, the hour-long set won't give us time to play all eighteen tracks from LOST IN THE CITY. So I'll just have to cut out the bad songs. Either that or no solos for Candace and Kevin.

The following night we head to Washington DC for a VIP backers party at the deej. Unless I'm impeached after the mid-terms.

More details and tickets on the GIGS page.

TILL MY DYING DAY

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY! Here's the next in my series of recording reminiscences...

The compliment I like receiving most is that my music is honest. I like to think this honesty is a kind of articulated ambivalence, a recognition that we can feel many conflicting emotions at the same time, that things keep changing. But the chorus of TILL MY DYING DAY (see video HERE) doesn’t seem to jive with that philosophy:

If I’m ever gonna love you
Then you know I’m gonna love you
Till my dying day

Okay, there is a conditional there. The singer may be hedging his bets, but it doesn’t sound like it to me in the context of the song.  Or am I just remembering what the lyrics were originally? When I first wrote the song the chorus was:

I’m never gonna love you
You know I’m gonna love you
Till my dying day

Truly. I had to be cryptic. I couldn’t bring myself to make a promise for a lifetime. Even in a song. Even though so many of my favorite songs by other artists do make such promises. It’s one thing to hear it from someone else, another to write it. Perhaps I should dwell longer on this point since it’s probably the most interesting cul de sac of this particular blog post but I’ll keep moving forward.

After several years of singing the awkward original chorus I began singing the song as it is on this recording from English Dream. 

Why? 

It just felt right.

I saw you there
In London town
Changing colors
Red to brown
As the sun went down

You’re an old lady
You’re a little girl
Caught you smiling
A string of pearls
As the sun went down

If I’m ever gonna love you
Then you know I’m gonna love you
Till my dying day

Someone on the radio
Is calling your name
You’re under the ground
On a Bakerloo train
Quarter to five

I bought me a ticket
Chelsea Arsenal
My team wasn’t winning
I thought of you
As the sun went down

If I’m ever gonna love you
Then you know I’m gonna love you
Till my dying day

THE RECORDING

There are rock songs with classic arrangements that can sound just as good stripped down to the minimum. This is the opposite. The song is nothing! It may sound like a perfectly respectable singer-songwriter number to be sung in the background at an acoustic cafe but it’s too slight even for that. It’s ALL ABOUT THE TEXTURE - the echo of the guitars, the sustain of John Young’s bass, the plinkety plink of Tony’s right hand on the piano, the plate reverb on the vocals and, most of all, Tim Vaill’s brushwork. Add Candace & Kevin’s weaving horns at the end plus Riley McMahon’s sumptuous mix and voila: one of my favorite Enemies recordings. 

So much so that it’s the opening track on ENGLISH DREAM. And an easy choice at that. We could easily have cut the intro down by a third but the vocal is exponentially more effective when it enters on the 25th bar rather than the 17th. Yes, I’m counting.

THE VIDEO

Once again we didn’t use the footage shot of the band at St. John’s Lutheran Church. As with Clear Your Mind we had dressed in 40s clothes and we (as in the royal WEE) looked ridiculous. And once again the archive British Council footage that Clare Elliott had edited for the background projection was simply too good. 

Luckily, Clare had also shot some video of the band recording the basic tracks at the Bunker Studio. So we very occasionally dissolve in and out of the black and out world like colorful ghosts. There wasn’t any footage of Kevin from the Bunker session because the horns overdubbed their parts later but, if you pay close attention, you’ll see him make a brief appearance near the end in a waistcoat and with his hair slicked back - the only remnant of the St. John’s footage for this song.

Still, the stars of the video are two British actors from the 1940s. Who are they? They’re not even credited in the archive footage. They are now ghosts as well. They both starred in a short 1944 propaganda film called London Terminus. It’s about a postal worker taking a woman for an evening date in the wartime capital.

We’re so used to postmodern appropriation that we no longer question the morality of using people’s images for our own purposes. Legally, there’s no problem - the film is public domain and the British Council granted us permission. But is it right to slap my song on top of their faces and share it with the world? The question is already old-fashioned.

It was only recently I realized how much the video reminds me of my mother and father. They also met in London in the 1940s, just a few years after the war. My father had dark curly hair. My mother was a glamorous American. They got married at St. Martin-In-The-Fields Church off Trafalgar Square in 1950. The marriage lasted 64 years until my father’s dying day in February 2014.

This is my Valentine to them. I love you, Mum and Dad.

Double Award Winner

The title track of my recent solo record BLAZE OF GLORY has just won two awards in a row. First it won the Mark Award in Los Angeles for Best Underscore In a Television Show. And then it won the Production Music Award in London in the same category. The whole song was used beautifully in an episode of the DirecTV mixed martial arts drama, Kingdom. You can watch the entire clip HERE. 

Many thanks to Thomas and Gregoire Kouzinier at the French label Super Pitch for commissioning the album. Thanks also to Riley McMahon, producer extraordinaire at New Warsaw Studio in Brooklyn. And further thanks to Carol Sue Baker at Ocean Park Music for pitching the song for the show. 

A Street Cat Named Bob

There's a lot happening this Autumn.
On November 4th the lovely feature film A Street Cat Named Bob will be released in the UK. Two weeks after that, on November 18th, the film will be released in the US. Two of my songs are in the film. Indeed, one of my songs, Beautiful Monday, opens the picture. The second song, Still Small Voice Inside, turns into a bit of a singalong halfway through the story.
The film's star, Luke Treadaway, plays a drug-addicted London busker who ultimately gets "rescued" by a stray cat. He performs both songs along with a few by Charlie Fink of Noah and The Whale. The story is based on the international best-selling memoir by James Bowen. 
How did the songs end up in the film? 
Funny you should ask. Since the director's name is Roger Spottiswoode it may seem like an obvious case of nepotism. But we're not related. Roger - who has directed everything from James Bond to Tom Hanks and Sylvester Stallone movies - happened to read a couple of scripts of mine during the summer of 2015. At the time he was in the middle of pre-production for A Street Cat Named Bob. He contacted me and asked if I might have a few songs...
To celebrate the New York release, the band will play its only show of the season at Rockwood Music Hall in Manhattan on Saturday, November 19th.

Germany

After five scintillating East Coast spring shows with my Enemies I've retreated to Europe. Next plan: invade Germany. Playing three gigs this July, two in Berlin and one in Hildesheim. Accomplices? Matti Muller, German gypsy gentleman guitarist; Jonny Gee, lunatic Anglo bassist; Angie Stricker, beauteous Berlin siren. A debut for the quartet. Makes me very curious. Particularly regarding backing vocal harmony textures. Matti and Jonny did an excellent job in London last Christmas. Who knows what the added dimension of Ms. Stricker's steely tones will bring. A German Emmylou Harris perchance? All to be discovered soon. Check the shows page for details...