On the first day of October last year – nearly nine months ago now – I posted to this journal a celebratory piece concerning the long-overdue uploading to the InterWebNet of some of the music of Anam Danu – the collaboration between the Chanteuse and I that had started roughly a year earlier.
We had chosen the excellent musicians’ site – Bandcamp – for this initial foray and made available a collection of seven tracks on which we had been working since the 2019 new year and which we had had professionally mastered by the estimable CPS Mastering of Vancouver. If you have not thus far been fortunate enough to have heard the Chanteuse in action I commend to you this offering – the which is entitled “Winds of Change” and which may be located here:
The October 1st post noted that to the seven tracks already uploaded were to have been added a further three songs – to complete the collection. Visitors to the site will, however, not have missed the fact that – nine months down the line – there are still only seven pieces there.
Unfortunately, scarcely had we uploaded the material – and certainly before we were able to make a serious attempt at publicising the fact – the first of a sequence of harrowing events overtook the Chanteuse. I am certainly not going into any of the details of the months that followed but I will just say that had some budding TV script-writer come up with such a far-fetched narrative they would have been drummed out of Hollywood. All I can do is to offer heartfelt sympathies for all that occurred.
As dictated by Sod’s Law we had no sooner held our first recording session subsequent to these events than the pandemic struck – along with the accompanying lock-down. That pretty much put a stop to any thoughts of further work and the powers that be have made it quite clear that singing is going to be one of the last things that we will all be allowed to do again in ‘public’.
What the rest of the musical world is doing at this point is finding ways to work and to record remotely – thus avoiding the problems of isolation. Because of the sequence and timing of the events that lead to this point we were not able to make any provision for such a course as the lock-down was imposed. I am now struggling to put in place a suitable mechanism for working in this manner – but much new learning is required and these things take time. I will – of course – offer updates on this journal as to how we get on.
The thing is – though we have been unable to record, I have also been unable to stop writing songs. Since we last worked together I have written and recorded the tracks for a further nine compositions!
It would be good to be able to finish some of them…
Tags: Celebration, COVID-19, Culture, Health, Music
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