We started the next album in Nashville on the 28th January. Thirteen days of pre-production and thirteen days recording in the studio. Lucky thirteen because we have thirteen tracks, all but finished except for vocals. Coincidence or what? How many will end up on he album is hard to tell yet… maybe all of them, maybe not. I won’t even begin to describe the music––an impossible job in any case.
It’s said that bad news comes in threes. It did this last week.
RIP Lemmy, Ed Stewart and now Bowie. Ashes to ashes.
I met Lemmy in the 80s and we bumped into each other sporadically over the years. The last time I saw him was at the Classic Rock Awards at the Roundhouse a few years ago. We were getting a lifetime achievement award.
Sandy Denny’s song is as relevant now as it ever was. Steve Miller sang about time slipping into the future. Our Time Will Come, Funny How Time Slips Away, Time After Time, Out Of Time, etc., etc. All about the same thing––that elusive and most precious of items.
And now it’s the Time Of The Season.
Back in my sixties, few months ago, I was hunting for my winter socks.
Those were the words on a famous poster at a time when posters seemed to matter, in the late 60s. Here in 2015, posters are old hat, summer’s gone and winter’s coming on. And that’s that.
Life has been packing and unpacking itself over the last several months. Life. One forgets to value it when events, pressures, schedules, responsibilities, etc. impinge on ones appreciation of the greatest gift… waking up.
I well remember a time in the early ’70s when Ian Paice and I shared a flat in Parsons Green. Despite, or maybe because of, the intense hard rock that we were performing on the road, we had a surprisingly eclectic listening taste at home. It veered, one might say alarmingly, from The Carpenters to Mountain, with the likes of Taj Mahal, Prokofiev, James Taylor, Hendrix, Vaughen Williams, Dr John, Elgar, Dave Brubeck et al.