ShareWriting In The Wild
25/01/2012
A trip into the wild for some REAL peace and quiet!
2012 January
Immigrant In Iceland
31/01/2012
So yeah, I’ve actually moved to Iceland.
Seems like a wild thing to do but it was not a hard decision.
I spent last January here and couldn’t remember the last time I had felt so amazing and at peace.
“And if it’s this good at the darkest time of the year (and it IS dark) how amazing is it gonna be in the summer when the sun never sets?!”
I had only been here a week when I went and looked at a house for sale by the ocean.
Why not? Why not wake up every morning to a view of The North Atlantic Ocean, mountains and the low skyline of Reykjavik City?
I guess with all the travelling I’ve done over the past 10 years anywhere quickly feels like home.
So yup, I’m an immigrant now, trying to get the grasp of this island’s culture and trying to learn a new, frustratingly difficult, language.
It’s exciting! And the peace and quiet, along with the mystery and “edge” of these landscapes and people, is proving good for the enjoyment of writing.
This mountain is my new best friend and the first thing I see every morning.
Her name is Esja and I’m sure her quiet presence will inspire a few songs.
Gathering Notes
19/01/2012
The first thing I did was to try and find all the words I’ve written down over the past year.
Quite the task. They were spread over Word documents and “Post-It-Notes” on 3 different computers as well as on my phone, as email drafts, in various notebooks, diary entries, on napkins in moving boxes etc etc.
Half of it is useless. Little random ideas written in some spur of the moment. Either simply bad or just incomprehensible.
But some of it has been a great inspiration to get going.
I prefer to have the core of the lyric before I start the music. Through the words you get an idea of a rhytm and often, with finished lyrics, the music will write itself.
The words often get in way as well, though, and half of the time I end up not saying what I really wanted to say because the rhymes and the melody take over and bend the story and the meaning.
But that’s part of the magic for me, too. When it ends up saying something I didn’t expect.
Knee-Deep In The Writing
19/01/2012
So I’m knee-deep in it; writing a new album.
I’m loving it and fearing it.
For the past many years I’ve written my songs on the road and on the run.
This time I have the rare opportunity to stay in one place for the whole process of writing and recording.
I wonder what it will do to the writing… Will it drive me nuts?
Hopefully it’ll allow me to get deeper into it than I’ve been before. Enjoy it more. Understand it better.
Working on albums in the past, I’ve always had plenty of ideas to get me started.
This time I was empty. NOTHING on the drawing board.
Not musically, at least. Lots of words and bits of lyrics, scattered all over the place, but no music.
Scary, but at the same time liberating. It could go anywhere. I had no leads.
All I could do was to start in some random place and see where it would take me.
I’ve been going at it, writing and thinking about writing, for almost 3 weeks now.
I still have no clue what kind of an album it’s gonna be. But the songs are coming. They’re not resisting. They want to be written.
I don’t know if they’re the right ones yet. I don’t know anything right now.
