Window wondering (releasing 3/11/22)
Finally, I have a new release coming (on 3rd November)! It’s only one song, and it has taken about 18 months, but still… I’m excited to be getting some new music out at last.
I wrote Window Wondering back in April 2021. I don’t really remember exactly how it came about, but I suspect it reflects the locked-down lives we were leading then. I was spending a lot of time looking out the same window, at the same view, as the seasons passed, wondering about the past, the present and the future.
The words reflect that general mood, I think. Around that time, I was a little preoccupied with the idea of missed opportunities — not so much my own, but those of younger people, including my teenage children, whose lives (and potential loves) were being so drastically curtailed back then. Of course, it’s impossible to know, or even imagine, all the life-paths disrupted by those circumstances. Maybe this song’s protagonist, musing as he is on a (romantic) path not taken, is channeling some of that sense of a lost, once-possible, future; foreclosed by circumstance.
I recorded an early demo of the song in my usual way (guitar-vocal) and put it on YouTube here, under the then title ‘I Wonder’:
That version is — as is usual for me — a simple guitar and vocal track. But from the start I’ve heard this song as a piano and vocal track. So, not long after the Glad Cafe launch gig for ‘Bloodrush’ this time last year, I asked Dan Brown (whose playing had been so brilliant that night) to record the piano track.
In February this year, I took myself off to Kintyre for a few days, rented a house and set up a bedroom as a home-recording studio. I recorded 4 songs and — although I wasn’t really happy with the results — I put three of them on SoundCloud in demo form. You can find them here:
Though the vocal takes that I had recorded in Kintyre seemed OK, I just couldn’t get ‘Window Wondering’ to sound the way I wanted. So a few months ago, I sent the piano and vocal stems to Jamie Savage to see what he could do.
Jamie is a magician. I have absolutely no idea how — working with so little — he could make the track sound so much better, and so much closer to what I was imagining and hoping for.
It’s not easy to put that sonic quality into words, but basically, I wanted it to sound like something you might hear in a 1970s piano bar, at the end of the night, while the bar staff tidied up, and the washed-up singer played one last song, to no-one in particular.
I’ve created a Spotify playlist of piano-vocal tracks to accompany the release, and the first track on there — Without You by Tobias Jesso Jnr. — is one that Jamie tells me he had in mind as he worked on the song. It was a new song to me. You can find the playlist here:
One final piece of the jigsaw fell into place when one of my friends tweeted a picture of raindrops on a window a month or so back. With her permission, that photo provided the cover art:
A row of shops and flat above, viewed through window covered in rain-drops.
Anyway, that’s the story. The song comes next and will be available in all the usual places.
I really hope you like it.