Knife

This week is going to be a fairly simple blog, no video, nothing overly geeky or informative about production techniques. Instead I thought I would divulge a little about my writing process in terms of the lyrical content within my songs. I never plan things, I just go with what my mind is gravitating to at that very moment and I just write. Sometimes things come out as poems, other times simple phrases and sometimes just a little lone word manages to dribble onto the page of my little black book. Other times I just start singing over a melody that I have recorded, I mumble things that sort of sound like words that might fit the feeling of the song. I listen and listen and slowly real words start to take shape in my mind, they become something that I want to sing about. I am not usually after that huge idea, the profound. Instead I have this hunch that if I just let things come out of me they will in some way connect as an entire piece, or album, and in turn connect in it's own way to whomever is listening. The one thing that has been a constant in my records is that each record has had a theme. My last record, "iii", was laced with feelings of isolation, aloneness from culture, the world. A sort of objectivity about my segregation from like minded people blanketed or disguised in the themes of lost love. I am very fond of double meanings, juxtaposing concepts and analogies. I love tucking little secrets into the songs that though would have little direct meaning to many, ad depth and complexity to any one given song, slowly trickling out like little gifts for the listener willing to take the time to invest. If isolation was the jacket then water was the spine of ,"iii". It ran through my latest record and is in some way in every song, be it a direct lyrical reference or an actual audio recording of rain tickling the windows of my house in Thailand. I didn't intentionally mean for water to be so present, but as I started putting the album together it seeped in. It was all around me literally, kept showing up in things I was reading and was a huge influence on my attitude, psyche and day to day activities. It somehow, deep within me, reminded me of myself, my awayness, my absence. It was almost inevitable that it would be so dominant in the record. As I have been slowly putting the pieces together for what is going to be this little 5 song ep, an object has been carving it's way into my life, cropping up in books I'm reading, thrusting itself into my thoughts and situations. I have an almost romantic draw to it. It is, the knife.