I’ve been working through the songs for the album – finishing the lyrics on some and putting them in sequence. Recording has been on hold for a while but we are about to fire up again and get the whole thing finished over the next two months before John goes off to China.
We are not too far out from finishing the recording part anyway – some more keyboard and vocals on a couple of tunes and I’ve got great early mixes of all twelve tracks.
So I’ve had time to fine-tune some ideas with the overall concept in mind – lay the tracks out in order and see what’s actually there. It has to work as an album not just a bunch of songs strung together. I’ve always done this in the past with Spines records – try to make a cohesive work.
It turns out that there is an arc that runs through this group of songs. Time skips around over a twenty-year period in little pieces of storytelling in the same way the Ghost stories do – a kind of odyssey through some thorny patches on different seas.
The two sides are different too with the second sounding more desperate and the first more elegant. I don’t see any obvious singles and the songs cover a wide musical range – plenty of different colours. Everyone’s playing is really fine throughout with Hannah’s voice threading its way around in new characters arranged into the songs. I know I’ve written about a few of these songs already but I thought you might like to know……
On A Daily Basis
The first song on the album and it’s a prison song. It starts where the Blood Monster album left off and is like an overture to this new record – stark love. In jail – down bylaw and overviewing everything from a position of misplaced trust
Explore
When she’s off with her compass looking into strange new unfathomable flat versions of the world and you’re stuck at home playing chess
End In Tears
Miserable portrait of an unfortunate incident coming home much later and walking in at the wrong time only to find…
For The Vulture’s Sake
…you are actually drowning
On A Need to Know Basis
Serenity now. A love poem to the early dawn and waking up to find
Rachel
The broken down jalopy of love – she’s the girl from the first song before the prison episode and the reason we are all here
Side Two
Saint June
Martyrdom or sacrifice – the story of the players in this melodrama and the reasons it all kicked off
A Little Shuteye
The song about the end of everything that started it all
Sex Can Be Sad
A love letter to hopeless lust
The Supersane
The mad sanity that blinds you from true love with the terrible logic that stifles and ultimately repulses
Jennifer
Trying to sum the whole thing up like a little kid with three chords
There Goes The View
The last song on the album is the prisoner on the run – escaped but still a slave to the same needs only now truly alone
The Ghost of Electricity – War Stories by Jon McLeary is a new initiative at Off The Tracks, a series of stories and reflections from painter, writer and musician Jon McLeary