The Tale of the Redemption of The White Tailed Sea Eagle
I’m sharing some preview clips of music from my forthcoming album in the hope of encouraging curiosity about it. (Still not made a final decision on title and artwork but otherwise it’s ready to go.) I’ve used different methods and instruments in creating the tracks than I might have done on a lot of my previous recordings and hardly approached any of them in the way of sitting down with my guitar to write a song at all, even though there are still guitars involved. For that reason I thought it might be interesting to describe something about the nuts n bolts of how this music was put together. I think these things because I’m a music nerd and love to discover what’s behind the process of the creation of music and recordings that I’ve connected with but I’ve also found that this information can help in getting a deeper appreciation of or a different perspective on what’s going on and this might often make me return to tracks or albums, perhaps with ‘fresh ears,’ to try and hear or make sense of something that’s been described or pointed out. If my wee descriptions do make you curious then just bear with me a little while until I get the album actually released to hear more of what I’m going on about in terms of the full tracks…
Redemption of the White-Tailed Sea Eagle
I made this specifically for an open call for submissions to be included on a compilation of music released in connection with Remembrance Day for Lost Species ( https://www.lostspeciesday.org/ ) and an earlier version of the track was included: https://remembrancespecies.bandcamp.com/album/remembrance-species-2020 Most of the music on the compilation is concerned with species that we’ve lost through extinction but having contributed a ‘Requiem’ for the extinct Monk Seal (also to be found on the new album) to a previous compilation I wanted a less morbid story to tell this time if possible. The ‘redemption’ for the Sea Eagles is that they were indeed extinct in this country for the last century or so but they’ve been successfully reintroduced, which is a slightly more optimistic slant in these trying times.
An even earlier demo of the track is on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/yHGFvZ53Yyo You can hear in that clip it was built on repetitive loops of guitar harmonics that create a pinging, tinkling percussive rhythm which suggested a fairly straight drum groove to back it up and then I jammed some guitar on top of that. In the demo it’s acoustic guitar but ended up being electric in the later recording, and I had some fun with more harmonics and string noise that I ring modulated with one of my favourite FX pedals to make them unearthly. Those jammed chord changes gave me a shape for a song structure and some lyrics that I wanted to use that, to be honest, weren’t written about a Sea Eagle originally but did have something to do with imaginative freedom and the natural world and I had a go at trying to avoid the cliché of going on about being as free as a bird while sort of suggesting a sensation close enough to that to allow me to relate it to the Sea Eagles. The loops, drums, electric guitar and bass seemed to be grooving along quite nicely but I reckoned a wee lift was required on some of the changes so some household items like pans, lids, metal ornaments and cutlery were turned into percussion instruments to supplement the rhythm.
Some more clips, stories and, eventually, the album to come……