Weltschmerz – The writing on the wall

7 October 2019

The board in the Studio control room is starting to fill up and I’m pleased that the ticks indicating ‘completed’ new songs are following the titles.

Robin Boult was up for a few days last week adding his thoughts and content to the material that Steve Vantsis and I have been working on and developing and we now have 3 more songs that are ready to take into the recording process.

‘Walking on Eggshells’, ‘Grace of God’ and the title track ‘Weltschmerz’ are all in fine fettle with completed lyrics.

While Steve is away on holiday for a couple of weeks I’m tasked with writing a lyric for a near complete ‘Rose of Damascus’ and coming up with lyric elements for ‘Market Garden’ which has a number of beautiful sections that need to be ‘glued’ and ‘directed’.

After talking with Calum Malcolm we have designated December and January for recording which gives us space to further advance the songs at this stage and create skeletons that we can ‘dress’ when the main recording starts.

At the moment there’s 55 minutes of material excluding ‘Rose’ which has a music skeleton of around 15 minutes and ‘Market Garden’ which looks like being around 10 minutes going by the sections so far and the planned lyrical content.

There are still a couple of other ideas we have to work on and with another 2 months until we start recording with Calum I’m more than confident there will be more than adequate enough material to deliver a weighty album.

It’s dark and I think it’s beautiful and relevant to the times we live in. Lyrically it has been a huge challenge and very demanding but I’m really pleased with what I have so far. The next couple of weeks on my own with the muse is a test and is going to require a lot of application and concentration.

I’ve not been posting much here as we have been too involved with the process and in all honesty it’s been emotionally and pyschologically draining. You will understand more when I start to leak the lyrics in the coming months.

Mark Wilkinson has the album cover well in hand and it’s an extremely powerful image which reflects the content perfectly. Like me he has been applying himself wholeheartedly to the project and it may be taking an eternity to get there but the end results I know you will be amazed by.

I’ve been lucky that I have the distraction and escape of the #funnyfarmkitchengarden to keep me relatively sane during this process and for those of you who visit that facebook page you’ll understand how the energies balance out.

I received great news from James Cassidy, who deals with all my digital elements and he informed me last week that I now have 50k registered followers on Spotify. Not bad for an ‘unknown Scottish poet’. If that number could only translate into album sales I’d be an even happier man! 😉