Raising Potatoes

Thoughts on starting album #7, with an early musical sketch for paid subscribers

We’ve been thinking about the new Sweet Billy Pilgrim album.

Already the Russian roulette barrel spin of joy / despair / indifference / excitement / frustration / utter bafflement has been timetabled into our mornings for the next two or three years. We are ready to pick one another up when the will fails and one of us baulks at the prospect of giving up all of our spare time to build a full-size Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks, probably just for family, a few hundred friends and two or three dog walkers to stare at bemusedly at before getting on with their day.

The work starts at an interesting time for both of us. Jana is at the beginning of her PhD journey; an enquiry into memory and identity in the rapidly evolving early-Modern landscape (East Anglia, for any history nerds out there), and I’ve moved back to the village I grew up in to help care for my ageing parents. Those two things, seemingly unrelated, have actually created a nice fertile patch of common ground in which we might cultivate some shared ideas; raise our creative potatoes, if you will.

Memory. Identity. A changing landscape. Childhood. Ageing. Love. Loss. It’s pretty universal stuff. What excites me about Jana’s work is that - despite it being her pHD - her storytelling instincts will elevate the humanity in parallel with the history and make her observations feel relevant and relatable. She has this uncanny knack of tackling even the most academic, esoteric subjects through the lens of someone who wants share the wonder of a thing with everyone, rather than just the wonder of her learning.

Realising that the stories around a shared history are what connect us, she moves easily between the dense networks of roots at the micro (family; local community etc) and the long, snaking data runs at the macro (climate; global economies; war), always aware that our innate understanding of the former often contrasts violently with our almost bloody-minded inability to comprehend the latter. That’s a gift to an academic (and their readership). It’s also a gift to a musical collaboration.

I’m looking at the same things as Jana, albeit from slightly different perspective. What does it mean in later life, to return to where you came from? Again. Memory. Identity. A changing landscape. Childhood. Ageing. Love. Loss. I’m conflicted about coming back. Two minutes walk away, my late brother is buried in the churchyard. One and half minutes away is the community centre where the eight year-old me squeaked In the Bleak Midwinter to an interval-ripe crowd at the village Christmas concert. One minute away is the house where my first extremely unrequited primary school love lived. From my new office window I can see the field with a slope down which we used to sledge as boys.

Don’t get me wrong. We’ve bought a house! In a beautiful spot, with a big old copper beech tree in the garden. We’ve a garden. I have a music room that’s not a cellar or a loft, or a fucking shed. But still I’m conflicted. There’s nothing around me that isn’t subject to some kind of memorial filter and I just don’t trust nostalgia. First it lowers our guard and then - if unchecked - our standards. It encourages us to trust the wrong stories (Make America Great Again; Brexit / Taking Back Control); it reinforces unhealthy histories as we wistfully slip back into earlier, simpler incarnations of ourselves, and it makes terrible music sound great again*, or - worse - it freeze frames our late-teen tastes with golden-hued, soft-focus memories of stolen Silk Cut kisses, ultimately trapping curiosity in amber.

But I’m here now, and there are great drifts of memory everywhere I look. As the new broom of my Dad’s Parkinson’s sweeps through his head and turns all his stories into pirouetting dust devils, I want to look at all this anew. Memory. Identity. A changing landscape. Childhood. Ageing. Love. Loss. We’ve been joking - collaboratively speaking - that we’re writing the soundtrack to Jana’s pHD (as no album press release said, ever). Or that it’s going to start a run of those increasingly contemplative albums that middle-aged people make until, finally, they gather their mates, a half kilo of coke, several crates of wine and produce their covers-focused ‘…and Friends’ record before considerately dropping off the twig.

Tethered to all of this is also the nagging feeling that in completing the circle and returning to where so many of my stories started, I’ve somehow failed; that I’ve demonstrated a catastrophic lack of imagination in a world of endless possibilities. Is this just a leftover from some toxic Kerouac / Hemingway inspired gendered fever dream? There must be a wist-less (rather than ‘…ful’) version of the middle-aged ‘reflections on memory and mortality’ album; we just have to make it. It must be possible to look back and move forwards, right?

And here’s one of the many places that Jana’s research starts to dovetail with our personal histories and their accompanying creative tectonic rumble. We all want to move forward and the past provides a useful context through which we might do that, if we are neither overly reverent or nostalgic, nor squeamish or dismissive about what we’re looking back towards. I also have the feeling that the traces we leave behind us have meaning whether or not they’re physical. The atmosphere of a place is not innate, perhaps; more imprinted. With wrists inadvertently brushed together. Laughter dancing like sunshine on broken puddles. Lips resting on forearms; grass on bellies. Softest singing. The trees and grass and wind remembering the shape of play in a way that we never could, and returning it to us, years later, through crippled adult eyes and ears and fingertips.

Somewhere in amongst these ideas is the next Sweet Billy Pilgrim album, I reckon. Memory. Identity. A changing landscape. Childhood. Ageing. Love. Loss. I want to create music with a sense of time and - possibly more importantly - a location; a place for the sounds to exist in. Music is so often transportive - so why not map the destination a little more formally? We’re not the first artists to tackle these things, obviously: art’s relationship with the Psychogeographical and / or the Hauntological grows ever deeper, but I think we might have some new stories to tell as we examine both the internal and external imprints of what’s gone before.

As artists, we want to bring people back to the campfire, even as so many stories are broken and bent and made into barricades. We have to find faith in them again.

Maybe that’s where the creative act comes in. By composing a beautiful poem, taking a great photo, writing the perfect song, authoring a PhD, or even producing a new Sweet Billy Pilgrim album we can restore a little bit of the trust in the stories that we tell ourselves and others, and maybe - for a while - that’s what art needs to be.

Below, for paid subscribers, is the first sketch from album #7. It might not make it to the final cut and it almost certainly won’t end up sounding anything like this, but we’ve made a start.

*Remind me… I have to tackle the Oasis reunion in a future post.