ESCAPISM ALBUM RELEASE POSTS

ESCAPISM POSTS 1-14 COLLECTED HERE FOR POSTERITY 

When I think about Try and Get Some Sleep I think about the early morning hours. For as long as I can remember I’ve loved to stay up late. Since you’ve been nice enough to read this post I figure we can talk openly here.

I don’t stay up because I can’t sleep.

I don’t toss and turn in my bed.

Just between us, I stay up so late all of the time because I’ve discovered a secret. To put it simply, sometime in the morning, a little after 3 until just before 3:30am, …time ceases to exist.

Really, it’s true.

Time is like a stopwatch that is wound sometime after 3:30 in the morning. After it is wound it continues to gather speed and power until it reaches its pinnacle at 3:00pm. That is when people are at their fastest. That is when the world is at it’s loudest. That is when you walk outside and the sun is so bright it imposes itself on you, forcefully. The brightness, speed, and power of 3 in the afternoon can leave many good people bowing their heads in submission, dumbfounded, and squinting. Thoughts zip around your head like so many bees in a crowded hive, all determined to go somewhere, but not entirely sure of why, and why is it so important again? You can’t answer these types of questions at 3 o’clock in the afternoon because you have somewhere you need to be…and fast!!! People spout out a lot of nonsense around this time because the words come and go so quickly that they are forgotten before they’re even spoken out loud. 3 in the afternoon is the best time to quickly shout out all of your nonsensical, boring, meaningless, and surface value ideas…and……phewwwwwwwmmmmmm….see, they’re already gone! This is why TV is at it’s most vile at this time. Shows this bad need to be over fast, and as I said, there is no faster time than 3 o’clock in the afternoon.

Then, sometime after 3:30pm time starts to wind down again. You may not notice this at first, but at around 4pm you may have found that you can catch a stray thought here, a stray thought there. The rest of your mind is still supercharged, but it is weakening slowly. By 5pm you may find that you’re eating dinner and you have actually been able to catch enough of your thoughts to ruminate on what the hell just happened to you. However, it is still not quite there and that is why when people you love ask you how your day was at 5pm, you say short, succinct things like, ‘fine’. You see, your thoughts at 5pm are like a fish you have caught, but it’s still flopping around the boat too much to actually get a hold of enough to express out loud. You may find that the sun is really screwing with you now, aiming straight for the eyes, but it’s only because it knows that 3pm is over so it’s giving you all it’s got before the end. Don’t worry, it’s all bravado.

Another mistake people make is thinking that time stops at midnight. Surely the clock is winding down, but midnight just sounds better in a poetical sense. People like a good beginning and end, and you know, with the twelve being there at the top of the clock it tends to suit most peoples love for symmetry I guess. Plus, lets face it, most people are either in bed, drunk, or high by the time 3am rolls around so twelve is as close as they get to infinity while still clear headed.

However, if you happen to be sitting at, let’s say a computer, or thinking, or working on some creative work at 3 in the morning you’ll know what I’m talking about. Time slows, slows, slooowwwssss, and then……you find yourself outside yourself. It’s uncanny. You make all kinds of rational and wise decisions on things you need to change in your life. The world seems to become somehow malleable so that you just reach out and shape it into ‘something’ that only makes sense to you between 3am and 3:30 in the morning. You live your entire life in your head, then you create another world to live another life in, and then you smile and reminisce about those lives that you’ve made and you grin again, slowly taking long, satisfied sips of coffee. Finally, you realize that you are needed back inside of time because that is the natural order of things so you sigh, rub your eyes, and look at the clock, which will always be waiting for you at 3:30am. You then nod, and allow the minute to pass…

The next morning you may arrive at work and someone will ask you how you’re doing. You’ll want to tell them about the worlds you made and the experiences you had and how you found a way to cheat time and death. However it will be impossible because scientifically it is impossible to truly express infinity within finite time, especially at say, 9 o’clock in the morning. So you give up and you say, ‘fine’ and leave it at that.

They may then tell you that you look tired and that you should ‘Try and Get Some Sleep‘…

When I was a kid I went through a couple of black and white, bleep bleep, TV bat and ball games… before meeting my first true love.  Now, this is going to sound really geeky.  In fact I am using a Sharpie to write “NERD” on my forehead as I type.  Seriously.  I may take a photo!  Ha ha!

My first true love… the Atari 2600.  Okay, perhaps you had to be there to understand… but I’m going to do my best to conjure up the tastes and smells of the era.

You have to picture a time when summers were sunny.  I realise this very first step is perhaps a bridge too far… but nevertheless, A TIME WHEN SUMMERS WERE SUNNY!!!  Morning TV was filled with Roland Rat and Wacky Races and the newsagent sold Pac-Man stickers.  They came with bubble gum.  “Yeah, yeah”, I hear you say?  (just whisper it if you like).  More nostalgia.  Nostalgia, nostalgia.  Let’s all reminisce about children’s TV back when we were young.  How it was better and the school holidays lasted forever.  A time, in fact, that the lyrics to Pulp’s ‘Acrylic Afternoons’ sum up perfectly.  I know, I know… it’s all too easy to think then was good and now is bad.  But you see, I’m sure there was more sense of wonder back then.  I sometimes wonder if there is any sense of wonder now.  And I sometimes wonder if wondering about the lack of wonder is a healthy past-time to be indulging in at all!

“The kids today don’t know how good they’ve got it.  A thousand channels that’ll fit into their pocket.  I lived through bat and ball, flick switches, bleeps and blops, tape machines, loading screens and visiting the shops.”

A line from one of my songs that kind of paints a picture of where I’m going with this rant.  For it is the lack of wonder that depresses me.  Today’s youngsters have PS3s, Ipads and mobile phones.  They have almost photo realistic graphics.  And not only do they have all this… but they have never known anything other than this.  The children of today live the future the children of the past dreamed of.

So I had my experience with the Atari 2600.  This was a classic gaming machine.  It had wooden panels!  It had flick switches!  It had an incredibly bad version of Pac-Man… Hmmmm, we’ll gloss over that last one!  So there I was… little Emrys… playing ‘Yar’s Revenge’ at my next-door neighbour’s house.  For you see, I didn’t own an Atari 2600.  I would go next door to play it.  Back in the days when there was such a thing as a neighbourhood.  My next-door neighbour was a bin man and in a way he may have influenced the way I progressed through this world. This man had guitars hung up all over his walls.  Now, I never actually saw/heard him play them – but they were there.  Hanging like artwork.  And I didn’t really understand.  I mean… back in those days musical instruments were musical instruments.  You would play with recorders and xylophones at school.  A guitar was just a guitar.  I wasn’t into music yet.  I was just into being ‘into things’.  So I would sit there and play the 2600… surrounded by guitars.  And I loved the games.  ‘Yar’s Revenge’, ‘Superman’ and ‘some kind of haunted house game where you would turn into a pair of eyes twisting and turning in the dark’.  The graphics were terrible by today’s standards, but they were all we had back then.  And we seemed to be always on the cusp of something.

My friend’s brother had a ZX81.  I remember watching him playing ‘3D Monster Maze’ and thinking “WOW!”.  The ZX81 had 1k of ram.  1k!!!  Even if you’re not into computers and don’t really understand what I’m talking about I bet you still appreciate that 1k of ram is not very much!!!  It is actually impossibly, inconceivably small!  Then my friend’s brother bought a rubber keyed Spectrum.  The Spectrum had 48k and was pretty much the coolest looking computer of all time.  At that point I owned an Electron.  I had owned a Commodore 64 but it broke and I now owned an Electron.  Actually, speaking about the Commodore reminds me of the first game I ever played on it.  ‘Forbidden Forest’.  This game is important as I can still remember the theme tune to this day.  Perhaps the most memorable theme tune to any game, ever!  I grew up with these legendary 8 bit chip music songs.  I think the emphasis on melody that these gaming tunes nailed home inspired the young Emrys.  But… I now had an Electron.  A more educationally orientated computer – (although in hindsight still a class act in its own right).  However, the grass is always greener and I would envy the Spectrum owners.  Their games seemed so much more fun!  ‘Jet Set Willy’ and ‘Fairlight’.  I eventually bought a Spectrum and was extremely happy with it for many a year.  In retrospect I realise that my friend’s brother was playing the Spectrum on a black and white TV.  Doh!!!  Nevermind!  Ha ha.  (Google “colour clash” if you don’t get the reference!).

I kind of digress… but in any case… as a boy growing up in a time when ET was a new film – videogames mattered!  We would play a single game endlessly. One day, the next-door neighbour gave me something he had ‘rescued’ from a bin.  He did an awful lot of ‘rescuing from bins’ when I think about it.  Perhaps some of those guitars were rescued from bins.  Anyway… he gave me a vinyl LP.  (Youth of today … google it!).  Fragile by Yes.  Gate-fold Sleeve.  Beautiful artwork – and when I finally played it some time later… the most weird sound.  A sound that seemed SO dated.  It would take me years to appreciate the brilliance of that album.  But for a long time it was just ‘the album from the bin’.  I still have that album.  And it is an important album to me.

Guitars, Yes and ‘Combat’.  (Combat … Google it!) Those summers were hot and those summers were long.  We would play outside in our dens in the trees.  We would ride our bikes.  And we would play videogames when they were known as videogames.  The word video was necessary in front of the word game just to stress they were different from board games.  Board games kids.  NOT BORED GAMES!  Ha ha!

We would play our consoles and computers and escape this world.  We would go to alien planets and mow down pedestrians on city streets.  We would escape our everyday lives.  The lack of graphics meant that we used our imaginations in conjunction with the game itself.  We would disappear.  We were the generation that disappeared.  And we still do.  We disappear even today.  It may still be through a videogame… or more likely via flights of fantasy at 3am.  But we can vanish.  We can rise above the bad in society.  We can rise above the injustice we see around us.  We can step back inside ourselves.  For we are the nerds and the heroes.  And many of us are not even really nerds.  It’s just that we are so strong we can admit to indulging in hobbies that the ‘general public’ frown upon.  I played ‘Pitfall‘ and swung across a 1000 crocodile infested rivers.  Could a rioter jump a scorpion?  Maybe?  A human sized scorpion?  I think not.  I rest my case.

When I was younger I used to believe that everyone, deep down, saw the world exactly the way I did. I mean how could you not? Just look around!

I was also a talker. If I was a car salesman in the 1950s people might just refer to me as having ‘the gift of gab’. It was my theory that all I had to do was talk to a person enough and I could get down to the heart of the matter. I just had to peel away all those social layers and then deep down, we’d be the same.

that simple…

I mostly made this mistake on girls. A pretty girl would walk into the room and I’d already be projecting all kinds of wondrous and mysterious things onto her personality. Sure, she may seem shallow, but deep down I could get to the real her! I would just hit that rock with words, like Henry Plainview in ‘There Will Be Blood’ and eventually I’d strike it rich!

Imagine my surprise to find out this wasn’t the case.

You set up the diving board, jump off full of excitement. you do your best trick, and you find the water is only 2 feet deep. You end up with a concussion, and a lot to talk about.

How dare she not see the world exactly as I do!

How dare she not love everything I love!

Depending on how stubborn you are, you may have had to jump off of many diving boards till you figured things out. You grow, you adapt, you learn to appreciate the different perspectives different people have on the world.

How often does something like this happen in a person’s life? How often do thoughts you have that seem so natural turn out to be utter, embarrassing nonsense in the light of reality?

In my recent post on ‘Try and Get Some Sleep’ I talked about the magic that is 3 o’clock in the morning. How many ideas do you have at 3 in the morning that just seem foolish once the next day rolls around?

A character comes to mind from David Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’. Her name was Dorothy and she was played by Isabella Rosellini. Throughout much of the film she is a classic femme fatale. Dorothy is beautiful, mysterious, dangerous, sensual, magical, etc. etc. A funny thing  happens though, at one point in the film Dorothy ends up naked and beaten on the main character Jeffrey’s doorstep, in front of Jeffrey’s parents and girlfriend! In an instant, everything that was once sensual and mysterious about Dorothy suddenly becomes awkward and embarrassing in the light of day. It’s as if real life had stripped her, pardon the pun, of some sort of magical power and now we were viewing her as she really was.

How many ideas are like this? They are mysterious and powerful in the night of your mind and then they become instantaneously ridiculous in the light of day. Perhaps it is for this reason that many of us deem it wise to keep our inner most thoughts and dreams to ourselves.

However, reality isn’t just a harsh, unforgiving force. A funny thing happens sometimes. Sometimes an idea, a thought, or a creative work can spring out of your mind into reality. The sun eyes it up and gives it all it’s got. Then, instead of melting like the witch in The Wizard of Oz, the idea becomes purified. The sun gets rid of the dross maybe, but what’s underneath passes the test. It is deemed worthy and suddenly it exists as a real thing, clever thing that the sun is ; )

So maybe you’re sitting there tonight and you have this idea. Maybe it’s just a thought of who you’d like to be. Maybe it’s something new you’d like to try. Maybe it’s a song that you want to write, or a movie you’d like to make, or a business you’d like to start, and on and on. There is always the fear that the sun, being very strict, may mock this thing you want to bring into being. It may destroy it utterly. You may be embarrassed!!!(the crowd shrieks!) However, just maybe,

… it may be found worthy.

It may become something very, very real in your life.

Is it worth the risk?

That depends on how you feel about your life? Are you happy? Are you right where you need to be? Is there anything you truly wish to do, but are afraid to?

I say life is short, and I’ve been embarrassed enough to realize that the world doesn’t end when falling off of a limb. In fact, not too long from now, I have an ‘Escape Plan‘ that has a scheduled audition with the sun. Don’t worry about me, even if I fail, I’ll still have Isabella Rosellini

Well, you get my point!

I sit here with a bowl of mint choc chip ice cream and stare at an empty screen.  A screen I know I’m supposed to be filling with insight.  With wonder.  With mesmeric prose.  And the ice cream is melting.  But it is good ice cream… because it hasn’t crystallised – you know, when you let it melt and then you stick it back in the freezer.  It comes out with ice saturated through it.  Ice cream with ice.  NO!!!!  I want my ice cream with no ice!  And that’s what I have.  So I am relatively happy.

To write about a song called “The Calm and the Storm” should be so fitting at the moment.  Bill is experiencing some of the sentiment of the song literally.  And while he ponders why the storm always has a girl’s name… I sit here eating mint choc chip ice cream.  Rum and raisin is probably my favourite flavour.  But I can certainly learn to live with mint choc chip.  Anyway, this relationship is not going to last.  The bowl is emptying steadily.  Well… sporadically… in between fits and starts of typing.

I sit here in my studio and recall the writing of “The Calm and the Storm”.  The album was progressing beautifully – plenty of hit singles in the making.  Things were in danger of becoming too easy.  I felt compelled to throw a spanner in the works.  I embarked on a song that couldn’t possibly, conceivably, ever be a single.  When I toyed with the Les Paul I was trying to choke out notes that would cause the listener to furrow a brow rather than tap a foot.  I was messing with time signatures and messing with the concept of what an Eleventh Hour Initiative song should be.  And when I finally sat back in my chair and surveyed all that was before me I realised that I had accidentally recorded perhaps our defining moment.  It was with a sense of trepidation that I sent Bill the music for “The Calm and the Storm”.  I so wanted him to like it… but for so many reasons.  I needed him to like it… because the song had become an important statement of intent.  The song had become a symbol of how strong my music could be.  How strong music could be.  full stop – /period . . . Like an obelisk surrounded by apes.  I had thrown the bone to Bill and I hoped the jump cut would work.  And it did.

Bill understood where I had taken our music and reciprocated with some tremendous lyrics.  Not only that, but he also added more to the music and made the epic more epic.  We could seriously state that our music was cinematic.  The song projects images into my head.  Static, moving, flickering, full colour, black and white.  The song is a true journey.  The song is a pivotal moment for the album that has become “Escapism”.  If we were brave before, we came out the other side victorious warriors.

I feel we need Bill’s input on this one.  For he talks so eloquently when the subject of this particular song arises.  And I think this song justifies a second talking head.

Oh.. and the ice cream has been eaten.  Everything is good.

‘Non Submersible Units’

So we’re sitting here now, I have no idea what time it is where you are, but let’s pretend it’s 3 in the morning. We need to talk clearly with this post, and as I’ve said, there is no better time.

I want you to think about some of your favorite daydreams. Are you there yet? Now imagine yourself. Who do you see yourself as? I don’t mean where you’re at right now, I mean where you’re going. Who is that person? How do you see the world? Again, not as it is, but as you think it should be. What about all those mysteries out there? What are some of your theories about them? What do you believe?

Don’t worry, we have infinity to do this, remember?

It is my belief, feel free to agree or disagree, that in order to be truly fulfilled you need to take all of these things out into ‘the harsh light of the noon sun’.

As I said in my last post, some things will be utterly destroyed, and yet that same destructive power will give other things life.

‘Why do I need to throw all of them out there?’, you ask.

Well, ok, not all of them. Just the ones that are important to you. ; )

It gets a bit more complicated though. You see, if you’re throwing everything you deem worthy out into the sun, well some of these things are going to be part of the core of who you are. Some of these things are going to be what Stanley Kubrick would refer to as ‘non submersible units’. These are your anchors. Destroy these things, and your whole internal world comes crumbling down.

Why risk it, then? Why throw something so important into the unforgiving sun?!!!

Because as awful and hard as it is, it’s a bit easier when you choose to do it. If you don’t, at some point, life will do it for you.

Trust me, life always hits harder…

Sometimes, whether you did it willingly, whether you saw it coming, or whether you were blind-sided, one of your non submersible units gets obliterated by the sun.

Some people refer to this as the death of the self. If you’re Christian you may have heard it referred to as ‘being put on the cross’. Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell would call it the death/rebirth archetype. Poets? They call it ‘the dark night of the soul’. If you asked the guy next door, he’d probably just call it deep, dark depression.

If you’re wondering if you’ve ever experienced this, then you haven’t experienced it yet.

Your entire inner world is utterly destroyed. Nothing remains. I mean nothing.

There is no quick recovery from this if it happens to you. Usually, at first, you need to mourn what you’ve lost. You want to hold onto that dream so bad!!! You fight, you struggle, and then, finally, …it dies.

What needs to happen at this point is you essentially need to be rebuilt from the ground up. Unfortunately, Rome is never built in a day, …or so I’ve been told.

It’s been my experience that you don’t have any blessed clue how to do this, how to remake yourself. You don’t want to. You don’t want to do anything! Then some time passes and all that fury of emotion settles into sadness, then cynicism, and finally apathy. You usually get one direction then. Call it intuition, call it what you want, but it’s like a quiet and calm voice, not audible, but you just know.

It says, ‘go here’

You say, ‘go here?!!!’ ‘why?!!’ ‘What’s going to happen?.’ ‘is this going to help me?!!!’ ‘i want some answers!’

It says, ‘Ok.’

‘go here’

So after you fight it, doubt yourself some more, and then fight it some more…. you get tired, and finally

you go ‘here’.

‘Here’ is not necessarily a physical place. It’s more about starting again. Everyone has a different ‘here’.

Once you get ‘here’, that same feeling leads you to go to another ‘here’

You ask all the same questions, and the process repeats itself, until you stop asking so much and you just go. I mean, at this point, what better thing do you have to do?

It takes a long time, but at some point, things start to feel ‘new’ again. There’s no other way I can describe it. Then you find that after another great long time you look back and you realize that you are a really different person than you were. You’re a better person. You come to terms with why that particular dream had to die. Something new and very real tends to take its place. The experience itself just changes you.

There is no moment I can put my finger on and say, ‘that’s when it happened!, Resurrection!!!’. I guess it just happens at some non-descript time when days are blurring into days. Maybe part of it is that you’re no longer thinking about it, so you don’t notice exactly when it happens.

I’m sure some of you have no blessed clue what the hell I’m going on about. This is for those of you who do. Even if you don’t, their may come a time in your life where you’ll get what I mean. When that happens…trust me,

‘Go here’

Sometimes you have to take stock and regroup.  Step back from everything you are and everything you do – from everything you have become.  You are defined by what you do.  Not always by your actions… but by what you do.  When you meet someone for the first time they will ask “So… what do you do then?”.  And you will answer with your job title.  And that then defines you in their eyes.  At least for that moment in time.  This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  A cycle.  Sometimes the assumptions are right, sometimes the assumptions are wrong.  But they are our means of putting people into boxes.  Putting people into jars.

Music is defined in the same way.  When I listen to a new band I immediately associate them with similar artists and categorise them accordingly.  When I heard Gene I thought Smiths.  When I heard Editors I thought Joy Division.  So it’s always a pleasure to hear a band that sounds fresh – where the links to the past aren’t immediately noticeable.  The roots are always there… but they may be buried deeper than others.  Fresh music… Black Sabbath, Blur, Oasis, Portishead, Flaming Lips, Jeff Buckley, The Chemical Brothers … the list is actually pretty long and you can substitute your own choices.  Of course… this music all becomes jaded in the end.  It’s actually difficult to remember how fresh Oasis once sounded for example.  And the welding of dance and rock has become commonplace.  We have probably reached an era in which it is more tricky than ever to sound genuinely innovative.  Yet there are still breakthrough acts which prick the ears – through being the future, or being engagingly retro.

I’ve now lived through a few ‘eras’ of music.  Metal, Grunge, Brit-pop, New Wave of New Wave, Emo, Nu-Rock, etc etc.  An important factor for me has been to keep my musical ambitions pure.  Okay, we can all be swayed by current fads… but I believe I’ve always stayed focussed on what I want to achieve.  Individuality.  And I’m not equating individuality with originality.  Individuality can involve originality… but they are completely independent concepts.  I’m talking about individuality of spirit.  Knowing what you want to say and saying it.  Not veering.  Even when swaying… swinging back to what is important to you.  For we all have something to say.  Some don’t have anything particularly interesting or profound to say – and luckily they therefore don’t venture too far into the artistic world (although when they do they produce some god awful bubblegum blockbuster, or a nice coffee table album!).  But those who do have something meaningful to say are a far more exciting prospect.  And those who have something to say and the means to say it are the reason music lovers love music.  That’s why we worship our Radioheads, Morrisseys, Buzzcocks, Beatles, Stones, Gorillaz, Cures...  Again, the list is a long one.  Individuality of spirit.  The most difficult of concepts to follow through with for it is all too easy to jump on a bandwagon.  To become a Northern Uproar or a Menswear.

To have complete individuality of spirit is however a double-edged sword.  For every person who ‘gets’ you, there will be a handful who don’t.  And that handful of people are often the most vocal.  It is for that reason that some of my favourite bands, films and albums are often neglected by the masses.  A lot of people prefer the glossy-Hollywood-remake-cream-cake to the authentic-slice-of-the-original pie.  And in some ways this is for the best.  It is great that some of the best music is not mainstream.

Life Will Be the Death of Me is probably my favourite song on ‘Escapism‘.  Musically, it embodies my notions of individuality of spirit.   I am on a journey and this song feels like a constant.  A fixed point in time and space.  A point on which all future work will be compared.  Will I ever again produce a piece of music that so perfectly defines who I am now? Where I am now?  No.  But the journey is like a graph.  A graph of plotted points.  Fixed points.  And I’m now living life until I can see that next waypoint.

“Hello… Um.. so, er… what do you do?”

“Well… I observe an individuality of spirit”

“Hmmm… sounds a bit pretentious to me!”

“Well… actually you might just be onto something there;  But I’ll stand by it. And life will be the death of me.”

Have you ever wanted to laugh at a really inappropriate time? Somebody is talking. The room is hushed. The mood is deadly seriously. An airplane flies by with a sign attached to it that says,

‘It Would Be Highly Offensive and Inappropriate to Laugh Right Now.’

This makes you want to laugh even more. You suppress it, which makes it even worse. A sound jumps out of your mouth like a death row inmate who found a hole in the prison fence, and you try to stop it with your hand as fast as you can. Everyone’s looking at you now with their best, ‘How dare you?!!!’ look.

A woman faints.

A crying baby goes silent.

Then, you …just…let…go…

… and it feels soooo good.

All of a sudden, everybody starts laughing with you. Those same people who were indignant a second ago are roaring like baboons, and the more you laugh, the more they laugh. The more they laugh, the more you laugh.

Ok, well the guy or woman who had everyone’s attention is usually furious at this point which is suddenly very, very funny.

It is my opinion that the world needs more people to crack the hell up at the most inappropriate times. We live in a world full of pink elephants that everyone ignores. We need to laugh at those elephants! We need to laugh at the absurdity of it all!

Imagine this…

It’s the presidential debate…

Some soul-less, moron pundit is asking the most general question you can possibly imagine like, ‘how do we fix the economy?’ After he asks the question, he reminds the car salesman…err I mean politician…that he has 30 seconds to answer this question…

The audience erupts into sustained and uncontrollable laughter…

Finally the laughter dies down. The pundit’s face is red and he finally volleys to the brand spokesman…again, sorry…i mean politician

The politician says a catch phrase like, ‘We are the people’s people!’ or something. You know, they’re always saying general crap like that. Words that seem to connote something good and yet they really don’t mean anything at all. Come to think of it, a politician talking is a lot like a McDonalds hamburger. It kind of seems like what it represents, but you just know that the ingredients are manufactured and not natural.

Someone in the audience yells, ‘We are the people’s people!!!!’ and then everyone starts cracking up again…

Hell, I think they should put a laugh track on these things. It would change our entire perspective on the debate. It would also be a truer view of what transpired. Whenever spin doctors come on cable tv shows you just hit the laugh track button every time they say anything. We could even get Charlie Sheen and the girl from Friends(what are their names?) to host CNN to fit in with the already sitcom-like vibe.

Yep, I am ranting, and that is partly what ‘Ready, Set… Explode!’ is about for me. It’s about reaching a point where you’ve just had enough and you just want the water to boil over already.

I’m picking on politics because it’s an easy target, but it could be any number of things. I’m saying that I feel like when watching 95 percent of anything ‘serious’ on TV I think the only natural response we should have is to just laugh and laugh. Maybe if we did, maybe if we laughed right away we wouldn’t get to the point where we have to face the consequences for all the farces we see on a day-to-day basis.

You laugh and then you politely ask them to please sit back down. You suggest coming back when they want to be serious.

Having different views or ideologies is not what I’m talking about. Intelligent, honest, and well thought out ideas aren’t that humorous. When you lose your home, it’s not funny. When you can’t pay your medical bills, it’s not funny. The Patriot Act? Well the name is kind of funny in a contrarian way, but you get my point.

All I’m saying is that, at this point, we need to question everything, and no sacred cows allowed! Remember that story about the Trojan Horse? Well lets just say you can fit a lot of things inside sacred cows. I want to live in a world where we’re not afraid to point out something like one of our civil rights hanging out of a cows ass. ; ) …no matter how ‘sacred’ it is.

What I’m asking is the next time they trot an elephant or a cow on-stage, I’m begging you, please!!!!

get ‘Ready, Set… Laugh!!!’…. ; )

‘Mean Machines‘ was a surprise. An experiment gone wrong and yet so well.  When Bill and I decided to make our collaboration a ‘band proper’, ‘Mean Machines‘ became the second song we recorded.  We had to follow the majesty of ‘Where We Go Next’.  Not easy to top a song that had so much slavish effort put into it.  So I sat in my studio, exactly as I am now, and stared at the blank screen.  I do a lot of staring at blank screens.  Don’t get me wrong, I do fill my days with other things too!  It’s just that staring at a blank screen is an activity which the modern musician cannot avoid.  In the old days I suppose the equivalent would have been staring at blank studio walls – or watching paint dry in a rehearsal room.  But now we have computer monitors to take some of the burden – to take the weight off our shoulders.  Staring at a computer screen can feel more fulfilling.  Ha ha!

I remember the day.  Some guys were in the house changing my old boiler.  I’m not referring to the girlfriend… I genuinely mean my old boiler (joke Dani xxx).  And I was in my studio staring at the blank screen.  Then I layed down the first beat.  And then the first bass roar.  In a couple of hours I pretty much had the song complete… in its most basic form.  One of the men changing the boiler expressed a bit of interest and would chip in with words of advice!  Ha ha!  But like I say… I had the bare bones of the song completed very quickly.  I’m actually quite proud of the music of ‘Mean Machines‘.  It is quite heavy and persistent.  I also really like some of the orchestral flourishes.

I sent the music to Bill with the title “Mean Machine”.  Yes, I did indeed name it after watching a Burt Reynolds film, but I always assumed the name would end up being changed.  Changed like an old boiler.  But Bill took the spirit of the music along with the temporary title and sold the concept to the world.  He owned that title.  And so with the addition of an ‘s’ that is how it stayed and will always stay.  The song is a grower.  In fact the song has become an entity bigger than Bill or I could ever have imagined.  In hindsight ‘Mean Machines‘ was actually the perfect song for us to work on after ‘Where We Go Next’.  It was a blast and proved that we had something in us to be able to pull off a song really quickly.  The song confirmed that the match of my music and Bill’s lyrics was not a one-off fluke.  And most of all it made us determined to produce a whole album of work.  Along the way we would often look back at ‘Mean Machines’ as being a defining moment and yet not a defining song.  Perhaps as people listen to the album they will decide for themselves the significance of the song.  Now… come on everyone… grow moustaches and stick your toupees on… we’re gonna have a party!!!

With the release of this album I’ve been trying to force myself to write some sort of short, concise band bio for reviews and such. As much as I talk, and write, these three paragraphs have been extremely tough.

We have to compartmentalize don’t we? There is just so much out there! We need to be able to easily fold things so they can fit inside of our glove compartments. How do you compartmentalize yourself? How do you fold it all into a neat square with smooth edges?

I didn’t want our songs to all be one feeling or tempo. I didn’t want it to be a ‘heavy’ album, or a ‘sad’ album, or an ‘experimental’ album, or…fill in the blanks. I wanted to be able to capture a time period with all of the strangeness and contradiction that entails.

Are you always sad? mystical? angry? love-sick? goofy? irritated? Me neither. I tend to float around all of these emotions and ‘feelings’ as the days go by. Right now I’m in a deep mood as I listen to ambient soundtrack music, but tell me a good fart joke and I’ll laugh and be out of it!

We’re all like this, albeit as individuals with different extremes, and different ‘nominal settings’. Then why is so much of our music one note? Why should I be always ‘THIS’ way, when that’s not who I am? I like a lot of different bands and artists who have different styles and traits, but I honestly can’t think of one where I go, ‘Yeah, that one there!’ Their is no musical genre or club I want to join. For me music is a means more than an end. I write when I feel something, and I try not to limit what ‘feelings’ I can cover.

That probably puts me in a club I don’t know about yet.haha

Somebody check Pitchfork!

I understand the necessity of it all. We’re bombarded with all of this stuff and the only way to organize it all is to be able to say ‘this covers THIS emotion’. Imagine Slayer making a ballad? Imagine Sade throwing down! Ridiculous you say? You don’t think Sade gets pissed? Ok, maybe the guys from Slayer, yeah maybe that’s for a reason. : )

I tend to just go for what a song makes me feel. To a degree, I don’t care what style. I don’t care if it’s a guitar or a synth or a violin. It depends on the day, and it depends what I’m focused on in the moment.

No, I’m not trying to make myself out to be some sort of revolutionary changing the face of music.

I mean, didn’t we make this album to be cohesive?

All of our songs certainly sound like us.

However, take three songs of ours, ‘Pitfall’, now listen to ‘Where We Go Next’, now listen to ‘Feel’. If any one of these was your first experience with our band you’d get a pretty different impression of who we are and what we do. Chasing Chaos? Now ‘Where the Start Begins!’

Truth is, we’re all these things. File us under those that are not easily compartmentalized, I guess. Who knows though, maybe I’m just in one of my ‘think about things too much’ moods and I’ll change my mind soon.

We’ll see how I ‘Feel’ about it tomorrow…

hmm wait, I still have to write that damn bio!

(irritably looks for Slayer’s ‘Reign in Blood’)

Wales v England.  Always a difficult one for me.  Welsh blood English heart.  I can’t remember the last time Wales beat England in the football.  Rugby… now that’s a different matter – but for some reason Wales just can’t pull it together in the football.  Ranked between Haiti and Grenada apparently… and that’s not good!  So it’s always with faint embarrassment that I watch Wales play football.  And although I support England at every sport it is always a tug of the heart-strings when they play Wales.  Like two sides of my soul competing in battle, ripping each other apart and yet coming together as one when the whistle blows.

Those two sides… the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other.  The devil telling you to write simple, easy on the ear songs and the angel telling you to always write from the heart.  Or is it the other way round?  Anyway, they both have a point.  The devil just wants you to succeed and earn a lot of money.  He just wants you to write that hit song – that song that’ll earn you a million dollars.  He just wants you to write simple songs that the general public can relate to .  He wants you to write a “Yellow” or a “Wonderwall” and then have an Adele-like album success story.  He knows you have to eat and he knows what you could do to fill that stomach.  You don’t even have to sell your soul to him… you just have to stick with the melodies, stick with the McCartneyisms, write “The Bends”.

But the angel tells you that the hits aren’t important.  The angel says that you have to follow your own path and write music that you can be proud of forever more.  Music that is artistically satisfying and sod the money!  The angel wants you to write “Kid A”.

For a songwriter this can be a tightrope.  I should qualify that!  There are some songwriters that will never experience this dilemma for there are many out there who couldn’t write a great song even if a friend travelled into the future, stole an almanac of classic songs then travelled back in time and placed said almanac under said songwriter’s pillow.

But for a lot of songwriters the devil and the angel are an issue.  In fact, the score right now is England 1 – 0 Wales.  England play in white, Wales play in red. Hmmmm… relevant? I’m serious.  The devil and the angel do indeed often come out to play.  The songwriter wants to be considered an artist you see.  An artist – fancy that!  The musician wants to be considered clever.  Ha ha!  He wants to write ‘clever’ music.  He wants to dumbfound and even alienate his audience.  For alienation can be satisfying.  Alienation can even be rewarding.  The devil struggles with this… but if you get it right you can alienate your audience and mesmerise them.  You can seduce them with an agile twist and turn.  The devil appreciates “Ok Computer” but is unsure of exactly how it happened.  The devil would rather you didn’t entertain such thoughts.  Forget it and listen to “Angel” by Robbie Williams a few more times.  Then the devil decides that suggesting you listen to “Angel” is a bit contrary and he suggests “Highway to Hell” instead!

The switched on songwriter knows you have to strike a balance.  Whether that be across the range of songs on an album – i.e. have a couple of singalong singles and a few deeper songs…  or internally within the song itself.  For a song can be clever and catchy – the perfect balance perhaps.  And sometimes songs that sound simple and catchy are actually clever and catchy but disguised as simple and catchy.  McCartney was perhaps the king of the simple and catchy (but really clever and catchy) song.  There are many exponents out there including one of my favourites, Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks.  Many of those songs that you think are just throwaway pop songs actually have an intricate, delicate structure hiding beneath the surface.  Or you were right in the first place and they are just throwaway pop songs!  Do you know which are which?  Do I?  Do you care?  Do I?

I think that a lot of songwriters want acceptance from their peers.  They need other musicians to acknowledge their talent and fulfil their want of worthiness.  And this exploration for the lost chord, the sound that will cause all others to down tools and proclaim “God-like Genius”tm status, can so often be their downfall.  I can think of a whole host of musicians that have at one time or another fallen into this category. It’s not important to name them… but sometimes just because you CAN play notes only a Golden Headed Langur can hear, doesn’t mean you have to!!!  (Steve Vai, not naming any names… but I am pointing at you!).

So when you find a band that gets this balance right you tend to fall in love.  Most of the bands I adore strike the balance.  They live with the devil and the angel and survive the conflict.  When one of these bands gets it right it moves you.  When the Flaming Lips released “the Soft Bulletin”, I felt that power.  That album was clever and simple.  It was the album Goldilocks would have chosen had the house had three record players rather than three bowls of porridge.  A close to perfect album.  I could have picked a whole host of albums to represent examples of ‘devil and angel’ albums.  I could have picked “Revolver”, “His ‘n’ Hers”, “Grace”, “Pet Sounds”, “Silent Alarm” or “Is This It?”.  Albums that reach the parts other collections of songs cannot reach.  And often the very same bands will start to prefer the advice coming from one shoulder over another.  They veer too far away from the line of balance – with various degrees of success.  They can be lucky and still produce an album which is loved… or they can be unlucky and create an album that becomes a source of amusement and derision.  I think the Flaming Lips, Lennons and Radioheads of this world have all veered from the path and enjoyed the positives and the negatives of the experience.

During the writing of “Escapism” I have walked that fine line between pretentious and commercial.  Every artist wants to have a commercial success… don’t let any of them tell you otherwise.  However, if you can achieve that success whilst never abandoning what you believe in then all power to you.  I think Bill and I have pulled off a sweet yet clever album with “Escapism” and I’m sure the song ‘A Thousand Steps’ was a contributing factor.  We chose to document every second of the songs creation – from the moment I first picked up the acoustic guitar, until the moment I finalised the mix.  As we worked on ‘A Thousand Steps’ I was fearful that we might be creating a song that satisfied us as writers but left the public cold.  But I’m pretty sure we took the advice of the devil and the angel and in many ways Bill and I actually become the devil and the angel during the songwriting process.  One of us will make a decision and the other will flag up its potential pitfalls.  A battle always rages.  A friendly battle… but a rewarding battle.  The outcome for us has been songs such as ‘A Thousand Steps’, ‘The Calm and the Storm’ and ‘Where We Go Next’.  Songs that don’t shy from being intellectual, and yet have that commercial appeal that the public crave… we hope.  However, please note that I will never confuse having an element of “commercial appeal” with being a producer of  “coffee table album”s.  Don’t fret… I could (and probably will) wax lyrical about coffee table albums in a future post.  😉  For now my friends, I leave you with track 9 of “Escapism”… A Thousand Steps.  Oh.. and Wales lost.

“Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation — the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

F Scott Fitzgerald- ‘The Crack-Up’

Holding two ideas that contradict each other, and considering both to be equally true, seems to be the only way to cope in the world, at least to any healthy degree. For example–my system, or way of seeing the world, is that anytime I try and put everything into a neat little box there will always be an infinite amount of contradictions that crop up and destroy, or outgrow, my little box.

In other words, I have a system that notes that having a system is futile and useless. See the contradiction? I’d note the term ‘uroboros’, but that would make an already pretentious post unbearable.

The universe, in my eyes, is infinite. If I lived forever I could come up with a million theories to explain everything, and immediately a million counter theories would crop up to contend against it. Again, I’d point to the term ‘dialectic’, but we’re already behind the 8 ball!

…Philip K Dick would love this post!…

A person who leans to a more Buddhist view of life might say the solution is to become nothing.(nothing to contradict)

Someone else might say that the solution is to become everything.(contradiction is contained)

Perhaps they are both right.

Perhaps in becoming nothing you become everything, and perhaps in becoming everything you become nothing.

Confusing, isn’t it?

Confucius say what?

I think most of us, whether we realize it or not, are stuck in the middle.

In order to stay sane you need a plan of action while at the same time you need to realize that things probably won’t go to plan.

Let me repeat…

1. You need a plan
2. You need to realize that your plan has failed the second you created it.
3. Both 1 and 2 are necessary

I think all of our lives are a bit like leaving early for an appointment, and then your car breaks down anyway.

Some say, ‘Don’t drive to the appointment at all! Don’t bother! You won’t get there on time!’

Others say, ‘Leave early and believe that your car won’t break down!’

The OCD’s say, ‘Perform Maintenance checks! Change your oil every blah blah blah miles! Take a GPS! Don’t forget to charge your cell phone!’

…Then someone else, who didn’t do any maintenance checks, gets a flat tire and rear ends them.

In the end, you can say, ‘…but sometimes people make their appointments! Sometimes things go exactly to plan!’

I’d point out that sometimes things don’t, and though I don’t know the equation for chaos theory, I can say that you can never quite predict the hows, whys, and whens.

Some might say that if you were really, really bright you could calculate probabilities that would help you to be successful more than not. For my money, the possibilities are infinite, and indivisible. You know, like Pi and the Pledge of Allegiance.

For my money, and hope, the two statements…

1. We are heading to Nothing

and

2. We are heading to Everything

Are both true, or at least in the end, whichever way we’re headed, we’ll eventually arrive at the same place.

However, If what I’ve been talking about is true, there are probably an infinity of problems with this theory that I have yet to foresee ; ), that of course doesn’t mean I’m not right all at the same time! It might just prove that I’m right!

Do you have a headache yet?

I think it’s kind of fun …’Chasing Chaos’

: )

We have been writing a series of articles in the run up to the release of our debut album “Escapism”.  You may have noticed?  To be fair, the majority of the world is unaware of our existence at this specific moment.  We hope to change that… but it is likely that these 14 posts will be read in retrospect by a lot of people hoping to get a bit of background on the album.  I can’t think of an example of such a wealth of material being written by a band in relation to an album.  It may have happened, we may not be unique… but we are certainly trying to do something a little different!  When/if these posts are ever read back to back they will be the greatest set of liner notes in history!  Ha ha!

I have been given the task of writing about our song “Where We Go Next”.  For starters this was the very first song that Bill and I worked on.  It was kind of a toe in the water… and it led to a whole year’s work on a full album.  I do understand that the album as a format is currently dead and buried.  However, I do not have to go with the flow.  The idea of a set of songs telling an overall story, or a collection of songs that flow thematically and have enough time to breath is a concept I hold close to my heart.  I admit this is probably due in part to the era I have grown up in… but I have a feeling that what goes around comes around, and the ‘album’ may yet rise again.

Vinyl sales are on the increase and I have bought more LPs in the last month than I have CDs in the last year!  Although downloads are the new King and are here to stay… I have a sneaking suspicion that, given a number of years, even the kids of today will warm to the idea of “more than one song in a row”.

And so it was that “Where We Go Next” started the process that became ‘writing a whole album”.  And “Where We Go Next” became such an apt title!!!  Where we go next?  Where do we go next?  Where we go next.  Was it a question or a statement?

I’ll say right now that the album is available for purchase from Monday 12th September 2011.  You will be able to buy the album from iTunes or Amazon – this is a proper album launch!  However, you also have the option of simply clicking the BUY link that will magically appear on Monday on the right-hand side of this site.  It just says ‘share’ right now but it will say ‘buy’ too.  (Hey, and while we’re on the subject, feel free to spread the word on our behalf!!!)

Anyway… I digress.  If you were to buy the album from this site by clicking on the BUY button you will also get the Digital Booklet that comes with the album.  And within this Digital Booklet is a little Eleventh Hour Initiative trinket.

Let me tell you the story of the trinket.

Rewind time a little.  Picture me as a solo artist.  I had asked Bill if he wanted to collaborate with me on a song.  I then went to Africa and took with me a Moleskine notepad.  I took a posh notepad ’cause I thought it would encourage me to use it.  My mission was to write a song, without a musical instrument to hand.  To write a song by just noting down ideas.  I found the sun, palm trees and sand – the change in scenery – conducive to songwriting and I tried my best to get something scribbled down so I could get to work on the “new song” immediately on my return to England.

… Then a volcano erupted and stranded me in Africa.  The airports of Europe shut down and I had an enforced African songwriting stay.  And so it was that I wrote the skeleton of what eventually became “Where We Go Next” in that little black notepad.  I had an idea for the melody of the song.  It was based on an idea I came up with in my youth.  An idea that I never properly recorded.  I did however use the chords and structure for a song called “Out of the Low Times”.

It always bugged me that I had never used the original melody though.  So when I was sitting in the sun in Africa I thought it would at least be interesting to pull the melody from the dark recesses of my mind.  I sat there, drinking lagers next to the pool, avoiding the attempts by the natives to get me aqua-dancing to some disco bollocks.  I thought it would be cool to bring an unused idea from the past kicking and screaming into the present.  And you know what?  It didn’t kick and it didn’t scream.  It came quietly and appreciatively.  Musically, in my mind, it began to take shape as a companion piece to “Out of the Low Times”.  You must remember that this was before Bill and I were the Eleventh Hour Initiative.  This was the origin story!  At this point it was going to be an experiment to have Bill collaborate with me on a song.  We weren’t sure it would work (but I had a fair idea that it would!).

On my return to England I recorded the song as set out in that notepad.  I filled wine glasses with differing amounts of water and played them as chimes.  I shook a packet of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes as a shaker and I beat boxed the drums.  The song on the page was brought into being.  I breathed life into the monster.  I then sent the music to Bill.

Bill came up with the most fantastic lyrics.  Certainly lyrics worthy of reading – just don’t read them at the same time as listening to the song.  Sometimes you shouldn’t multi-task even if you can!  The song became “Where We Go Next”.  The song became our statement of intent.

In the Digital Booklet I have included the original pages from my Moleskine notepad.  This trinket makes interesting viewing for anyone with any interest in seeing how a song takes shape.  And if you don’t have those kind of interests then you can at least mark me on my spelling and grammar!

“Where We Go Next” may be proved by a future society to be a landmark song.  But for now I will just hold it dear as the song that reignited my spirit.  The song that brought about the “Escapism” album.  And therefore, perhaps the most important song I have ever written.

I thank you all.

I’m sorry for the delay in posting this article. In the time since Emrys last wrote regarding ‘Where We Go Next’ we’ve released ‘Escapism’ to the wide world. You can download a digital copy of the album right here on the site by clicking ‘buy’ on the player to the right. You can also buy the album on Amazon or iTunes by typing ‘The Eleventh Hour Initiative Escapism’ into the search bar on each respective sight. You can even get a physical CD from Amazon!

We’ve also made a ‘guestbook’ page which you can see right there at the top of our site, (what do you mean you can’t see where I’m pointing?!!!). You should stop in and say hello. You should also hit play on the player we put just below the palace picture on the guestbook page! You’ll hear a test recording of Emrys and I. You see, we’re trying out the idea of making a podcast every now and again. Yep, a real proper podcast with guests and everything. Why? We thought it might be interesting and funny, and most importantly, fun.

For all the amount of times we shill our album and all of this stuff, it’s because we want to connect with you. Buying the album, commenting, and all of these seemingly small things tell us you’re listening. I joke about how poor I am all the time, but in truth, it’s not the money, it’s the recognition and connection that keeps us going. All of the kind and good words people have said to both Emrys and myself since we’ve released this album… that’s why we do this. It’s not about being the most popular, it’s about making meaningful connections through things we love.

You need to make many moves to position yourself properly to connect the way I’m talking about.(No I’m not referring to sex) I mentioned in my last post my struggles with the almighty band bio. Well something odd, and yet helpful has turned up to assist me in this undertaking.

What does this have to do with ‘All These Secret Things’, you ask? Well if I told what all my secret things were we’d have to call the song ‘All These Plainly Known Things’ and that kind of takes the fun out of it. Anyway, my help with the band bio is kind of secret, in a way.

I was getting ready to go to work today when I noticed a guy dressed straight out of the 1940s hanging out in a tree outside my house. He even had a really antiquated camera and he was taking pictures through my window!

Seriously!

He looked kind of like this: 

I yelled, ‘What the hell are you doing?!!!’

He made a sound, it kind of sounded like he said ‘Gadzooks!!!’ and he fell out of the tree and ran away.

…but he dropped something.

It looked like a file of some sort. It was a manilla folder with “The Eleventh Hour Initiative’s debut album ‘Escapism’ and the Possible Threats it May Pose” written in large, black letters across it.

Leafing through it I was amazed! It seemed this guy had been spying on Emrys and I since June of 2010! All kinds of awkward pictures, jotted notes and phone transcripts?

I’ve begun trying to transcribe some of his notes down to give to the authorities, but I figured I’d share a bit of it with you guys/girls. You see, I think this guy may have written our band bio for us!!!

Have a look for yourself…

‘Submitted per Request and for Your Review: The Eleventh Hour Initiative’s debut album ‘Escapism’ and The Possible Threats It May Pose.’

Band: The Eleventh Hour Initiative

Members:

Bill Ryan(NJ, USA)- Vocals, Music

Emrys Hughes(Plymouth, UK)- Music, Vocals, Production

Nearing the finishing line now with the longest set of album liner notes ever!  Ha ha!  So… track 13 on “Escapism” is a song by the name of ‘From Shipwreck to Shore‘.

I’d say that the phrase “From shipwreck to shore” could probably define this album.  Let me explain this.   I was feeling shipwrecked.  I had been in a number of bands before I formed the Eleventh Hour Initiative.  I had released a couple of albums worth of material with varying degrees of success before I met Bill.  I had been favourably reviewed in magazines and gigged on the same local circuit as bands which have now gone on to bigger and better things such as Muse.  I played and recorded with phenomenal talents such as Seth Lakeman and Jonny Crosbie.  But by 2009/10 I was feeling washed up… jaded.  Normal life had not only caught up with me, but had settled me to the point of retirement.  When it came to being a musician, I was shipwrecked.

“ocean waves beneath a high wire
not quite yet so light it on fire”

Bill wrote some really beautiful lyrics for this song, the last to be recorded for ‘Escapism’.  The song sounds pop – which I am always drawn to.  I like a good melody.  The song also has a sense of urgency, and for me at least, a sense of danger.  Danger and anger.  The “high wire” line is one of the most astute and exciting lines on the album.  Hats off to Bill for splendid lyrics throughout… but the words to this particular tune really push things forward.

Writing “Escapism” has been like being born again (musically… certainly not in the Stephen Baldwin sense!!!).  The album as a whole has been like a breath of fresh air.  The songs are all about this moment in time and have helped me to regain my musical mojo.  And yet you can never escape the past.  Many of the songs had roots in old ideas, never professionally recorded, but existing solely in my head or on 4-track cassette tape.  ‘From Shipwreck to Shore’ was once a song about a babysitter.  Let me clarify… the musical motif was once the basis of a song about a babysitter.  A song that I never recorded with a band and never released to the world.  I love how the same past that can break you can also make you.  I am aware that I sound as pretentious as Morrissey (and am semi-stealing his lyrics!), but this concept is what makes the world go round.  The same past that can make you bitter and twisted can then bring you out from the doldrums, eyes squinting into the bright light.  What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and all that.

So “Escapism” has coincided with the re-emergence of Emrys as a willing songwriter – a songwriter that enjoys writing songs rather than simply ‘needing’ to write songs.  If I had to hang my hat on an album I  would happily hang it on this one.  It is the kind of album that inspires me – and as I had a hand in creating it I do realise how egotistical that sounds!!!  “Escapism” is an album that I would love to follow up.  I would be fascinated as to what kind of album the Eleventh Hour Initiative could create next.  But… to allow that to ever be a possibility we have to know that people have appreciated “Escapism”.  For while we can certainly do what we want to do as artists and to hell with the consequences… it would indeed help to have some of you along for the ride.  So, don’t hesitate to let us know how you feel about our songs, our album.  And please spread the word, for we have no machine behind us.  We have no invisible men pushing our presence on Youtube, manufacturing us behind the scenes as the next big thing.  There is no rope pulling or guiding us – and certainly no safety cord.  There is no svengali masterminding our world domination.  There is only Bill and I.  And you.

I found the shore.  From Shipwreck to the shore.  I now raise my head and observe the land before me.  And it looks just mighty fine.

So I guess it’s up to me to write the last of our 14 posts.

‘When the Start Begins‘ is an apt title, because that’s how we see where we’re at as a band. I share a similar back-story with Emrys. I was also at the end of my musical rope when we began working on this album. The Eleventh Hour Initiative has also given me new life, and an island in the sun.

Emrys and I have also mentioned our struggles trying to connect to you, the listener. As he said, we’re just two guys trying to promote ourselves because we love these songs and we want them to be shared. We have no army of ‘professionals’ working for us behind the scenes.

It’s just us.

Honestly, it feels a bit like slinging rocks at Goliath sometimes.

Who cares? Right? I mean, why would you care how tall the mountain is that seems to be staring down at us?

My answer would be that you’re probably looking at a similar mountain in your own life.

Different goals – Same struggle.

Some give up, and just daydream about these things. Some people are pragmatic about their goals. Some, like us, and maybe you, are stubborn and refuse to accept good enough as good enough.

There is no right answer.

My point is not that we have an answer.

My point, our point as a band, and as people who write on this little blog site every few days is that we want to share everything that happens to us while we try.

Maybe it helps to see someone struggling with a similar goal? Maybe it helps to see things from a different, and not necessarily correct, position?

Where we mess up, and where you mess up, are probably more important to who we all are as people.

My dream is that just maybe it’s possible to be successful while trying your absolute best to be as honest about your weaknesses as you are with your strengths.

That’s really what we’re trying.

That’s the goal we’re asking for your support with.

We’re trying to be 3D without the glasses.

All in all, Emrys and I just made an album I’m more proud of than anything I’ve ever done. This is the last in a novel full of 14 posts containing bad grammar, humor, insight(maybe?), and a lot of genuine soul-searching.

So where does the start begin?

It begins with you passing me my slingshot. We’ve got a lot of work to do…

My genuine and heartfelt thanks to those of you who have been following along with us and supporting us along the way.