The winding road to album release: Latest news

I was supposed to be filming and doing a photo shoot this weekend. In the end the photo shoot got postponed, which worked out well since I was totally exhausted and it was chucking it down with rain all day.

The filming went pretty smoothly though:



Beautiful weather, beautiful room, did a nice live version of 'Consumers of the World, Unite!' complete with loop pedal, plus an interview for the EPK (electronic press kit).

I will of course be posting these when they are edited. Thanks to Josh Klaassen for the filming and post production, and Lauren for pulling this all together.

Since Saturday was cancelled I ended up spending much of the day uploading the album to Tunecore. That's who I'm using to distribute the album digitally. They need the tracks in very specific formats - bit rates, sample rate, and all that malarky, which took a bit of getting my head around. And the files are pretty big and take a while to squeeze up through the pipes and into cyberspace. So that was a few hours, and I still haven't finished!

I've also been working on layout of the album cover after receiving a totally excellent illustration from a friend in Athens (check out his other work at www.slightlyfox.com).

I have decided I will offer the album in both digital and CD formats, since feedback from various quarters strongly suggests that people who still buy music often buy it on CD.

For me personally, this is a bit of a compromise, since the environmental impact of CDs is bigger than digital only. Still, the packaging will all be from recycled sources, containing no plastic, and the inks used will be organic and non-toxic. So I have found ways to limit the impact at least, while at the same time giving the album a decent chance to get out there in the world and be listened to.

I am actually quite excited to be getting another CD out. It DOES feel different to be creating something physical with music on it, rather than just a bunch of ones and noughts floating around on the world wide web.

www.padmaland.com

Doing a bit of DIY

Yes friends, my second album will be a truly independent release. Just Music, the record company who released my first album, have decided that they don’t feel they can market it.

To be honest, I agree with them. They are a chill and downtempo label, and my music has been moving increasingly away from chill. In fact, my aim with this album is to incite people to do the exact opposite of chill. I am hoping to inspire people to action.

The album is not just an album, and it’s not just about me. It’s a call to action – all about climate change, sustainability, the need for political and economic change, and our need to reconnect our spirit with nature. We are living in the biggest crisis, and the most exciting age, that humanity has ever experienced. I’ve been banging on about this in my blogs and at gigs for ages. Now, finally, it will be reflected fully in my recorded music.

Last time I had press, radio and online promotions people helping me out. I had people with their fingers in important and tasty pies all over the place. I had people who liked having meetings in Soho, having meetings in Soho on my behalf. I had people who knew their way around the music business making their way around the music business for me.

This time things will be a little different. I’m a tad daunted, but mostly just excited about doing this on my own. Well, I won’t be entirely on my own – my manager Lauren at Backstage Vancouver will be helping out.

I’ll also be relying on you guys to – PLEASE! – help me get the message out there. Word of mouth (and word of mouse) is going to figure quite strongly in the promotion if it’s going to make any kind of splash at all. Which is great, since that’s the most authentic way of going about things anyway.

The latest, and probably final, title for the album is In Defence of the Wild. I have decided not to pursue another deal for this release, at least for now, to leave me free to do some fairly unconventional things without having to argue with anyone about it. I shall tell you more about those things another time. But the key thing is I’m hoping to make it as zero waste as possible. The medium is the message.

I’ll be posting some music from the new album very soon, and will be documenting my solo journey much more regularly from now on. I figured it might be interesting for people who are looking to release their own stuff to see how I do it, and how I do. I learnt a fair few tricks from doing it with a label the first time around, so let’s see how this goes!

A BIT ABOUT THE ALBUM

I called the album Here for a few different reasons. Firstly because I had a brain haemorrhage in 2005, and the odds of me still being here right now (and in a state which would allow me to make the album) were by no means in my favour.

But also, if I had to distil the Buddha’s teaching into one word, that’s the word I would choose. Being fully present, in this moment, where we are right now, is to be truly alive and awake.

And finally, I move around a lot. I’ve lived in so many places. Sometimes I’m driving a car and I can’t remember which direction I should turn because I can’t remember where my home is right now. Or I go looking for one of my books and then remember that it’s in a box on a mountain in Spain. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and there’s a couple of seconds where I have no idea even which country I’m in. Where am I? Here.

Some of the songs on the album [e.g. Throw My Drugs Away] have been in existence for 10 years or so. Many of them were written in the last year. So the subject matter is pretty varied, though the overall texture seems to me to be pretty constant. There is a kind of melancholy, which over the years I have realised is my ’default setting’, and seems to be based on a view that rests deep in me: Life is futile and in the end meaningless. This view was not even shaken by my near death experience. At the same time, I passionately believe that life is beautiful, the universe is amazing, and all humans have incredible potential. This paradox is at the heart of my perspective and therefore my music.

I tend to write on a personal level, from the point of view of how things affect me in day-to-day life, since this, in the end, is the most real and direct. I don’t really choose any particular subject matter consciously – I don’t usually start out thinking ’I’m going to write a political song about the inherent sickness and alienation of city-living’ [e.g. Firelight Dance]. I just mess around on the guitar, and ideas roll around my head, and this is what comes out. Like one day I was driving up the mountain in Spain where I live sometimes, and we stopped to collect cherries from a tree by the side of the track. And I thought ’Wouldn’t it be nice if food just grew on trees’. And that became If Friends Were Neighbours 2. Sometimes I write a love song, sometimes it’s a song about opening my eyes after meditating and watching the sunrise. And sometimes it’s a song about my own experience of the vibrancy of the ’natural’ world, or my own lack of satisfaction with consumer culture, or the generally bland offerings of mass media and international corporations. I find that everyday life offers stories that have worth in themselves but which are also symbolic of something deeper. Life as a metaphor for life. In general that’s my approach to songwriting – write as simply as possible and let the words point beyond themselves.

There is a Zen story about a guy who wants to paint bamboo. So he goes to a master painter and asks to be taught. The master says, "If you want to paint bamboo, first you have to see bamboo". So he looks. He looks in the morning and the evening, in the summer and winter, day and night, when he is happy and when he is unhappy. Eventually he sees the bamboo. He takes out a brush, and with one swift movement he paints the bamboo. This was his path to Awakening. Hopefully it’ll be mine too.