Spring Summer Awesome Winter Cover Art

One day soon I'm going to release a new album, the second long player from this thing I call Bond Street Bridge. That day will be the 20th of June 2011, which is why I said 'soon.' I've been working on it on and off for a quite a while, in between things like sleeping in, feeding the cat, and cleaning out the fishtank, which keep me quite busy. It's going to be nice to have it out in the world, or at least out of the house.

The album, as I may have mentioned before, is called Spring Summer Awesome Winter.  If I told you in the past that it was going to be called something else, it's only because I tend to just say things out loud as they occur to me and often they turn out to not be correct.  Fortunately things don't occur to me that often, or I would talk even more than I do, and I don't think we need that.  Anyway, I think you'll agree that Spring Summer Awesome Winter is a better name than whatever I might have said before - the only problem was trying to think of something to put in the press release about why it's called that, because people will ask.  I can't remember what I said on that front, but the real reason is that it sounds cool.  The rest is just hype.

Making albums.  Really the best thing about making albums is that you get cover art, and if you need cover art the best person to go to is Ms. Millicent Crow.  She's supposed to be writing a thesis at the moment, which you will probably be aware is reasonably time-consuming, but we have invented a machine that makes a couple more hours in the day. (We called them 12a and 12b o'clock, in case you were wondering.  The best thing about these extra hours is that phone never rings during them, and the only other people on the internet seem to be experimental physicists).  We use one of those hours for general relaxing, and the other one is for things like making awesome cover art for albums.  Here's what Ms. Crow came up with for this one, using watercolours, ink and gouache:

This is the front cover. The red leaf has a halo because of how awesome it is. 

This is the inside, the bit you see when you open it up. Each picture illustrates something from one of the songs, so for example one song has a line about a cigarette lighter, and one has a line about a feather and so on and so on.  Incidentally, not many of the songs make a lot of sense now that I come to listen to them, but that will probably not come as a massive surprise to regular readers of this blog. People sometimes ask whether, given that the songs don't make a lot of sense in themselves, perhaps the things like feathers and cigarette lighters and so on might be metaphors for other things?  Possibly more sort of significant things, like beauty or truth or the nature of love?  The answer is no, they usually aren't.  They're only in there because they sound cool.  The rest is just hype.

This is the inside of the booklet that you pull out and have a look at while you're standing at the merch table in a dimly-lit bar after a show, trying to figure out whether I will shut the hell up and stop talking at you if you just give me the twenty bucks for the album, or whether that would only encourage me.  The answer is almost certainly the latter, but you should buy it anyway because of the awesome cover art.

 

This here is the back of the album (on the left) and the bit that goes under the tray that the cd sits in (on the right).  Now would be good time to reflect on how good the layouts are, which I think is this: pretty good. And I would say that, because I did them.  I don't think they're necessarily so good that you'd be surprised that I did them, but I also think that they're just about good enough that you'd wonder whether maybe I did about half a semester of design school part-time at one stage and then realised that it was too much work and dropped out. Which is pretty good, cos I didn't even. Look, there's even crop marks and a 3mm bleed and stuff, cripes.  If you pay me, I will do the layouts for your next record.  You will probably not even need to pay me very much; for somebody who has spent such an inordinately long time getting educated it is amazing how little I will work for.

Big World

My friend Tim Guy has just finished a new video.  It's really good, and you'll probably like it; I know I do.   He shot the video, I'm pretty sure he said, while he was on tour around New Zealand in the summertime. If you've ever been on tour around New Zealand in the summertime I urge you to have a look at it - you'll recognise a lot of the places you drove hundreds of ks on windy roads to play shows at.  There's that sweet gig you can do at Milford Sound where they take you out on their boat in the morning, and then on the way home you can listen to Kashmir the way it was meant to be heard - in a van full of amplifiers driving through the Homer Tunnel, which looks very much like it was hewn by Dwarves with two-handed axes.  There's the pass at the top of the Cardrona road, which isn't the quickest route to Queenstown, but if you have to play there you might as well go the pretty way.  There's someone's house near Invercargill or somewhere with a cat and a dog, where you had a ridiculous party after a show where the drummer in the support band was probably dressed like a pirate and you woke up on the couch. Then there's the Wellington motorway just before you get to the ferry to play what is often the most hilarious set of the tour: 10 a.m in a fake Irish bar on a half-empty boat crossing one of the most notoriously choppy stretches of water in the Southern Hemisphere.

I like this video it because I've been on tour with Tim, and being on tour with Tim was pretty special. He didn't do any of the driving - I can't remember why - but it was cool with me because I like to drive.  He would be in the back of the car, often keeping quiet, and he shot videos on his camera.  Sometimes I'd sneak a look at them and there was something about each of them that made them better that the videos that people often shoot on their cameras from the backs of cars, like he would have noticed the way all of the windmills were turning at the same speed as they came over the horizon, or he'd be mumbling something hilarious and barely audible into the mic.   When we were in Paris we walked for a couple of hours from where we were staying at the confluence of the Marne and the Seine, along the banks of the river and all the way into the city.  I can't remember what we talked about but we talked the whole way, and when we got into the city we found just about the most expensive bar they had and got tall glasses of beer for around ten euros each.

In Berlin we stayed with my friends in a room with white walls and concrete everything, on the ground floor of a building that seemed pretty old.  It was a good room with a big oak table and mostly we just sat around listening to the way our guitars sounded in the room.  In Hamburg the show was just off the the Reeperbahn and Tim was looking for the ghosts of where the Beatles put in their ten thousand hours or whatever it was, but all we found were packs of Englishmen with loud voices and lots of hookers who frankly terrified me.  In the countryside outside of Stuttgart we spent some nights in a barn made of stone in a compound on an old vineyard, and everything was solar-powered because the people who lived there were photovoltag engineers at the solar plant down the road.  Power was supplied by a complex web of cables connected to a bank of batteries hooked up to solar panels in various stages of brokenness, and the lightswitch in the room where we slept was nowhere to be found as far as we could tell. We didn't want to bother anyone at night and during the day we would forget to ask about it, so we slept two nights with the fluorescents on.

The whole time, I listened to Tim play his songs most nights and sometimes we'd do some songs together because his songs are a lot of fun to play on.  A lot of people's songs you'd get sick of after hearing them night after night, but Tim's just grew on me.  When he came through Auckland a month or so ago it was a good feeling to sit down and play some of his songs together, and I got that feeling again when I saw his video just now.  Go on, have a look:

Now We Are Twenty-Eight

A while ago, actually last year, I turned twenty-eight.  Twenty-eight isn't really a very advanced age I guess, but at the time I was tutoring at the university and my cohort of students hadn't even been born yet when C+C Music Factory's seminal track Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now) reached number one on the U.S. Billboard hot 100 chart, so I was feeling old. These kids thought Robin Hood was Russell Crowe not Kevin Costner, and the scary movie that gave them nightmares when they were ten?  That was The Fellowship of the Ring.  So I was feeling old.

So of course I did what anybody would do in my situation, which was shut up and write a song about it. The song I wrote is called Now We Are Twenty-Eight, and it deals with, you know, issues.  Like the feeling of feeling old.  Issues and feelings, in one single song - that's value for money. What's also value for money is that you can actually download this song off my bandcamp site and stick it on your ipod or off-brand portable mp3 player for free, and here's why: it's the lead single off my new album, and we've figured out that secret about economics where you make money by giving stuff away.* The album is called Spring Summer Awesome Winter, it's out it June on Monkey Records/Banished From The Universe, and don't worry, we'll talk about that later.

The thing that's quite exciting about this song is that as well as giving it away free to the good people of the internet (that's you), Ms. Millicent Crow and myself have also done a limited edition hand-printed run of actual physical copies, handmade on this nifty little screen-printing machine called a gocco.  I can't remember why we decided to do this, but here's what we did: each of us designed a cover based on pictures of a petrol can and a pile of books (which are kind of in the song), and then we printed up fifty of each of them, making a total run of 100 copies.  These are available exclusively at shows until they run out, or if you see me in real life you can ask me for one.

What I will do before I give you one, though, is get you to look at both of the designs and make you tell me which one you like the most. I've been doing this to people for the past week or so, and the results so far confirm what I suspected, which is that I'm not as good at drawing as Ms. Millicent Crow is.  So far 100% of respondents have said they like hers the best, but on the plus side they've given me feedback like 'Your one is actually surprisingly OK,' or 'that's not bad  for someone who doesn't draw much.  You don't draw much do you?' Which is pretty encouraging.  I mean yeah, I don't draw much. I'm kind of an outsider with this drawing thing.

 Millicent Crow's one

  My one.  I think mine has a naive charm.

The other quite fun thing about this song is that Nigel was apparently shooting video on his little camera the whole time we were tearing around Europe in an A-class mercedes on the tour with Tim Guy last year, and he's put together a video for the track using footage from that time that features me looking reasonably classic with my touring beard on, driving quite fast, sleeping in cars, talking to geese and so forth, which is a fair summing-up of what went on on that tour. Like the best music videos, the pictures don't have a lot of connection to the song, but it does feature a guy nearly setting his face on fire and it's definitely worth a look for the waterfowl alone.



And just in case you were thinking that there isn't another thing about this song - wait, there's another thing about this song: it's actually three songs!  So both the free download and the handmade CD include the title track Now We Are Twenty-Eight, and also two more tracks from the Spring Summer Awesome Winter sessions.  The first, The Old Place, is about accidentally telling the cab driver to go to the house where you used to live instead of wherever you live now and then rambling at him about it, which I think is something that most people do at least sometimes.  For various reasons that song won't be on the album, so I guess its official status is 'outtake.' The other one is a complete reworking by Nigel Wright of another track off the album and one that he's been doing with me in the live set lately, and it's a totally unrecognisable and very beautiful reverby drone piece that makes me think about falling asleep in a long-range nuclear submarine, or maybe inside an empty grain silo on a hot day, and having a dream about alien monks chanting in slow motion, which again is something I think will resonate with a lot of people.  So: Content! For you! Hope you like it.


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*If I tell you how it works, economics will stop working, money will become worthless, and we will all starve.