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Last week I picked up the new album by American pop-punk band Yellowcard, it’s got a great title, (When You’re Through Thinking, Say Yes) but isn’t exactly setting my world on fire. It’s ok, but they really do make the same album over and over again. Anyway, despite this repetition, I like it, it’s got some catchy songs, in a poppy, glossy American kinda way, and it more or less does what I expected it to do. Listening to it made me go back and listen to their earlier songs from previous albums. I always liked the song One Year, Six Months (see video audio clip), as with a lot of their songs, it’s about memories. They write a lot of songs from this lovesick melancholy perspective, misty-eyed and all ‘emo’ about days gone by and all the regrets that go with them. This is partly why I like them, it’s easily-digestible, yet sincere (enough) sentiment.

Yellowcard – One Year, Six Months

Anyway, it’s got me in that nostalgic frame of mind recently, more so than usual you could say, and with that in mind, I’m reminded of last Saturday evening and an Italian girl called Nikki.

I was in a bar in Hammersmith. We (the crowd of about 10 friends and family I was with) had made our way there after a long and hazy afternoon in a function room in Pimlico. It was a riverside bar and was in fairly boisterous mood in the aftermath of the massive party that had taken place there, hours previously during the big Boat Race between Oxford and Cambridge. Caring not a single fleeting fig for the boat race, and a little unaware of the furore surrounding it, I was somewhat surprised by the scale of the party that was still in full swing. There was wall-to-wall people, beer spilt everywhere, a smouldering barbeque outside by the river and a long stretch of port-a-loos, none of which featured a light source, so they were somewhat…messy..

Anyway, it was fun. But to the point.

I found myself standing by the bar beginning to chat to a fiery young Italian lady who had just arrived. She was called Nikki. She was quite attractive, had long dark hair, thick-black glasses (but not the wanky ‘media-shoreditch’ kind), and deep, intense eyes that were almost black. She was quite drunk, and quite aggressive. She immediately reminded me of someone I used to know very well.

So we got chatting, and from the off it was really more an argument/screaming match than what you could legitimately refer to as a ‘conversation’. It began with her declaring her undying allegiance to West London football team QPR (she’s lived there for 3 years), my football allegiances were of little concern to her the moment she realised I wasn’t a QPR fan. From there we then went on to talk/argue about London, Italy, Ireland, politics, art and probably a lot inbetween. She seemed to object to pretty much everything I said, and wasn’t shy in showing it. She slammed her drink down on the bar several times, shoved me once or twice, I remember an awful lot of finger pointing and raised voices, and her general level of profanity was excessive, even to me. She was quite possibly the most objectionable, stubborn and obnoxiously volatile person I’ve ever met, and yet I enjoyed chatting to her. Despite the obvious mental problems, she had an unhinged passion that I find very hard to resist, she really gave a shit about what she was saying, and I have a respect for that I guess.

“This woman hates me so much. I’m starting to like her.” – George Costanza

I gave her as much shit as she gave me, and this seemed to earn her respect. Before long, she was all smiles, congratulating me, like I’d passed some sort of psycho test, and with that, she promptly turned her attention to another unsuspecting male victim at the bar. He didnt do so well with her sociapathic test process and once she punched him in the face, the bouncers moved in swiftly and removed her. Bye bye Nikki, you absolute nutter.

Anyway, the thing that occurred to me at the time, and what is left with me now, is just how much she reminded me of an old friend. She was like an evil caricature version of course, but her Mediterranean ferocity was familiar to me in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time, and it was strangely, perversely ‘comforting’. I know I probably sound as crazed as she undoubtedly was in saying that, but that half an hour was almost like getting reacquainted with a personality I’ve missed for many many years.

I spend so much time thinking about the past. I know you’re not meant to, but sometimes it always seems so important and vital to hold on to. It can turn the most mundane, unexpetced moment into something you maybe haven’t felt or thought about in years. It can make a half-hour chat with a violent nutjob a comforting nostaglia trip, it can make a song you listen to, allow you to relive a moment you may never feel again, and it can also ruin your day.

But what it never seems to do, at least for me, is make me appreciate what happens as it’s happening. I feel all the time like I already miss what has just happened. Like everything’s going so fast so quickly and changing the very moment it flies by, and I’m desperately trying to grab hold of it. I miss that conversation I had on Saturday night, because I still miss my old friend, I miss moments and feelings I had last year, last week, last night, I miss the excellent red curry I just ate (though I know I can repeat that exact experience tomorrow night if I choose, though I may try the green). and I miss being able to write a blog post that didn’t waffle on for way too many paragraphs. (That’s never happened).

But this is nothing new. A million bands have written a million songs about this very subject. I’m pretty sure I have as well at some point. This could be something that comes through on the next cd I make, the one I’m currently putting together piece by tiny piece. Whatever the songs are about, they will function as they always do, little 3-4 minute tributes to memories

And now I’ve gone and missed my bedtime.
Goodnight

Thomas

I’ve been on a bit of a recording/writing blitz the last few days, the emphasis very much on the writing. I have been keeping little boring mundane notes about the writing/recording process and other random junk on my Tumblr page over the weeks, but as I sat down to write another Tumblr update, I figured I had enough to record it up on here instead.

The process continues to be one that moves very slowly, and there just doesn’t seem to be much I can do about that, but it’s starting to go somewhere. I’ve collected enough new songs now at least for an albums worth, though I’m still not sure I wont just trim it down to a 6-song Ep. I’ve got a title track in mind and a vague theme, but it’s still early days.

Especially as the songs I’m writing aren’t necessarily coming out the way I had planned. There’s definitely a little more ‘light’ in the mix of shades than I was expecting, or compared to the material that was previously written. The weekend was a blur of scrappy little song ideas here and there, nothing’s completely finished in terms of writing, but the bare bones are there. Last night’s song was folky and up-tempo and quite miserable in that folky kinda way, and then tonight, accidentally, right before I turned off my recording gear half an hour ago, a quick strum on a higher pitched capo-d guitar produced this weird little happy acoustic pop tune that came together pretty quickly. That’s maybe what’s surprised me most at what I’ve written; there’s a distinct undertone of ‘pop’, must be all the American pop-punk I’ve been listening to on repeat recently..

So the recording process is still in its infancy, all these new songs currently exist as scrappy one-take demos, and I’m still a little pessimistic that this trusty old laptop has any more multi-track recording left in her, but I’ll find out soon enough I suppose. I think I’ll continue to demo the songs even when I’m not recording, play them through every night if I can, get them as good as I can. Usually I record everything very quickly, but as is the mantra for this new project goes; ‘slowly but surely’, and there’s no point in rushing, even if I had the luxury of time in which to do so.

I’ll keep this relatively short and sign off. For more frequent updates on all this stuff see those tiny wee social media buttons up there on the top right of the page, they’ll take you where you need to go..

Thanks for reading

Thomas

“When you’re through thinking, say yes” – Yellowcard

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You should always put the most important information at the start so that people’s limited attention spans get what they need to know. So with that in mind, the other band I play in, Ghostlight, released our debut album last week. It’s called Somersaults and we need all the support we can get as an independent band. The album is something we’re all really proud of and I think you would like it, yes, that’s right, I’m saying that you will like it if you listen to it, that’s how confident I am about it. Listen to it and prove me wrong by following these links – Webstore, Amazon, iTunes.

So that’s the main plugging done. I can now move on to what I’m much more comfortable doing and that’s  rambling on at length about it.

We, as Ghostlight have lots of professional, official PR releases and biographies and stuff; that flowery gumph you see on every band’s MySpace/Facebook page, I even have them on my own pages, but this is my own account and biography of our band and our debut album. I guess I should include one of those disclaimer things you get on DVD commentaries about how the views expressed here are my views alone and do not necessarily reflect the view of Ghostlight the band, but that doesn’t really matter because so few people read this, and because I’m probably not going to say anything that controversial.

Anyway, Ghostlight began a few years ago. It began with me and my good friend Al White. I met Al in University in Farnham, Surrey in 2001. We both studied animation and Al was already writing and recording loads of songs in his spare time. We hung out a lot and would stay up late at nights playing music and once or twice did the odd gig for friends.

When we left Uni, we went into a recording studio in North London and recorded an album under the name SMDGE, it was a collection of songs that Al had written over the years and I played bass and electric guitar. It was engineered by a big audio-tech-nerd called Jason who put up with us for several weeks whilst we recorded what we thought would be the be all and end all of our recording careers. The album didn’t do anything, we released it on our own website, but it was never official.

We went back to record 3 extra songs a year or so later, Jason again engineered and he brought in his good friend Patrick to drum for us. It was a few months after this that we got a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to tour with Al’s favourite band in the world Sparklehorse. The UK tour we supported them on is still probably the best week of my life and the story of that tour would fill a lengthy blog post all of it’s own. I might write that one day..

That was the beginning of Ghostlight. Jason and Pat came on full time shortly after that as we set about to record some new songs, with a new name, and a more focussed direction. The pursuit of making one big, proper, complete album would last for the new couple of years.

Al had written a whole bunch of songs, and the four of us began to play and rehearse regularly. We would hear Al’s demo, then the four of us would rip it apart and put it back together again, and the songs that would go on the album started to come together as whole pieces of the four of us, adding our own ideas and making something that would represent us as a collective.

The album was recorded mainly in 2 stints at Real World Studios a year apart. The days we spent there were amazing, an experience we are so lucky to have had, and we produced and recorded all the songs ourselves and continued to experiment and try any and everything we could to make the album exactly how we wanted it.

It was finished quite some time ago now, but its release has been delayed for reasons typical of the music industry we are all forced to be apart of.

We always get the same two names used when people talk about us; Snow Patrol and Coldplay. Such comparisons are natural and expected, though I’ve always found it interesting that I don’t actually like those bands, but I like us. The thing is, a lot of what’s popular in music is mostly based on trends. Coldplay are one of the biggest bands in the world but have a stigma attached to their image that says they’re a boring, bland band, and as such aren’t ‘cool’. And we all must constantly seek to be seen as ‘cool’ right?? Coldplay and Snow Patrol write good songs. Simple songs, that people like and relate to. A whole lot of people like them and their success isn’t a surprise. I’d like to think people could hear that there’s more going on in the record than lazy rip offs of ‘Cold Patrol’, we all in the band like such a wide variety of music, and to me there’s a lot of inspiration that’s gone into creating our album that comes from as diverse a collection of sources as electronica, to metal, to country and a whole bunch else.

So we are forever linked with Coldplay and Snow Patrol, and as such, we aren’t cool. But I believe in the album we made, and I believe that if the right amount of people heard it, a lot of them would like it. I know every band thinks this, so it’s hardly a revelation, but we face the same problem every one faces; people won’t listen.

If you do listen, hopefully you’ll hear something you like. It’s something I’m very proud of, and if it wasn’t for Ghostlight, this site and this Down In Autumn band of mine wouldn’t exist at all. Personally, my favourite tracks on the album are the final two songs. ‘Sway’ and ‘Primer’, songs that would never get released as a single, but songs I really believe in and enjoy. The thing I’m most happy about with it though, is the fact that I can listen to it, and hear all four of us contributing. If you like what you hear when you listen to Down In Autumn, then you will hear bits of it throughout our Ghostlight album.

Happy listening

Thomas

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Finally getting round to writing a new blog post! I should really be recording new music right now, but I’ve overdosed on caffeine and as such lack the patience to sit through a 3-and-a-half minute guitar take. What better way to release some of these caffeine jitters by battering frantically on a laptop and ending up with a probably disjointed and rambling blog post? Well, I can think of several things, but for various reasons they’re not an option right now..

This will be a fairly short blog post, mainly just an update of all things Down In Autumn, and to reassure anyone checking this blog that I’m not actually dead.

A new album/ep is underway finally. I haven’t decided whether it will be a full album yet, maybe once I get 5-or-so songs finished it will make a nice ep, but the goal at the minute is to do a full length, as time is so limited these days that I fear already in March that I won’t keep up my one-album-a-year record of the last few years. I’ve begun recording songs that have been kicking around for the last few months. I used to work under the process that I come up with something and record it, or at least a version of it immediately. These days when I come up with something, its noted down on my phone recorder or written down on a notepad, to be gone back to at a later date when I start to record. This process lacks the immediacy I’m used to and as such I tend to lose interest and forget old song ideas whether I like them or not.

So far there are 3 songs recorded to a varying degree of completeness and another 6-7 written. I have a feeling this is going to be a very quiet album, a bit like the last ep, but we shall see, so far it’s definitely going that way. I have several themes and titles in mind for it, but it’s way too early to be blabbering about them on this blog yet.

And that’s that for the minute. The thing about this social media age we live in, is that it’s so much easier to update less, more frequently. As such, this blog gets neglected whilst things like Twitter and Facebook get much more frequent and immediate updates. I’ve also started using Tumblr a lot more, and it will provide the platform for the more day-to-day, personal journal of this new recording process. The links to all these sites can be found as little buttons up there on the top right of this page.

Also, it’s been very ‘Ghostlight‘ the last while. I’ll do a separate blog post about all the Ghostlight album later, but for now, our album is out and available, and you would earn my eternal appreciation if you bought a copy and supported us, it can be bought from here, or downloaded from amazon or itunes.

Thanks as always for listening and reading. Stay tuned for new stuff in the near future..

Thomas

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No One Ever Knows – An Ep of Covers Vol.3 *Click here or on the image to download a zip file of the new cover songs ep*

Surely every band/musician plays cover songs? At one point or another it’s a staple of anyone who plays music.  From the first song you ever learn to play, the music that gets you to pick up an instrument in the first place so you can emulate your favourite songs and musicians. Even established bands will still play the odd cover, it’s a way of showing respect and tribute to the songs that inspire you, a way to treat your fans with taking something they already know, and putting a new twist on it.

For me, Metallica was the band that started playing music. If it wasn’t for them I would never have picked up a guitar, and it was their mammoth catalogue of riffs and solos that I spent hours obsessing over, learning as I went along, without even realising it. As yet, I’ve never covered a Metallica song, but I have no doubt I’ll attempt it some day.

So anyway, the point of this introduction is to ‘present’ the latest collection of cover songs I’ve recorded. It’s the third in what I guess you could call a series of Eps covering songs that I love for one reason or another. I try to do at least one a year. Some times when you go through a bit of a writer’s block, it’s nice to spend some time not having to worry about that, and record and experiment with songs you already know, it allows a certain level of freedom and fun that is sometimes missing when recording your own songs. Previously I’ve done an ep made up of covers all originally by female artists, and then a 2nd covers ep, that was a fairly random collection of songs. This new one is much the same..

The new ep is 6 songs plus 2 remixes. I’ll write a brief description of each as well as a link to hear the original (mostly YouTube videos), and you can also download the entire ep with front and back cover art from here, or on the discography page.

1. Last Night originally by Motion City Soundtrack (click here to listen to original)
The foundations for this cover were recorded back in 2009 and I was originally going to include this in the previous covers ep. So it sat unfinished on my hard drive for nearly a year before I rerecorded most of it and finished it off for this one. It’s quite different to the original version, which is faster and more upbeat sounding. The idea to cover it was when I was planning to do a covers ep of my favourite pop-punk bands.

2. Bloodied Up originally by Alkaline Trio (click here to listen to original)
One of my favourite bands in the world, I’ve been planning to cover an Alkaline Trio song for years., and for some reason, I cant quite explain, I always wanted to do this one, an album track from their 2001 album From Here to Infirmary. This is a fairly scrappy little cover, drums were recorded at home over Christmas, and the louder vocals were recorded late at night after an evening in the pub, so not the most polished of covers, but early Alkaline Trio always had that quality to them, so hopefully I get away with it..

3. Heart of Darkness originally by Sparklehorse (click here to listen to original)
I recorded this the day after Mark Linkous aka Sparklehorse committed suicide early last year. I had in my mind to cover Sparklehorse for a while, and I always loved this song. When I heard the news on a Sunday morning back in March, I was pretty shocked and saddened, so I spent an hour or so that afternoon recording this as a small tribute to an amazing artist.

4. The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows by Brand New (click here to listen to original)
I have been planning a Brand New cover for years, but I always wanted to do Seventy Times Seven from their debut. This cover came about from jamming this song with my brother Niall whenever I spend any time back in Ireland. This was all recorded over Christmas last month at home in Castlewellan. Niall plays the drums and sings the backing vocals, and I even managed to get my sister Catherine to contribute to the group vocals in the middle 8 and the end. All the vocals to this song were recorded on New Years Eve evening, yet sound remarkably sober, a fact I cant quite explain..

5. Goodnight Moon by Go Radio (click here to listen to original)
This is the odd one out on this ep. The other songs are generally by my favourite bands, whereas Go Radio are a band I only discovered last year, and only have one ep. However this song was one of my favourites from last year. The original is very much a big, glossy American emo pop song, and as such will be an acquired taste for many, so I wanted to try it a bit more stripped back and acoustic.

6. Call It Off by Tegan & Sara (click here to listen to original, *one of my fav music videos)
This cover was originally part of a ‘live’ session I recorded in my bedroom at Easter last year, you can hear the other tracks on my Soundcloud page. This was a little bonus cover, recorded in one take and tacked onto the end. It’s a very straightforward cover of what I think is a beautiful little song.

7. Friends by Les Sages (click here to listen to original)
This remix was part of a remix competition last summer. The prize was to feature as a bonus download on Les Sages’ album on Deep Elm records (of which I’m a bit of a fan boy), an amazing prize, but one I didn’t win. Oh well, I still love the band..

8. A Drowning by How To Destroy Angels (click here to listen to original)
Trent Reznor’s new band released this on a debut ep last year, and what with Trent Reznor being the top bloke he is, as with his Nine Inch Nails stuff, he made the song files available to download and remix. This was the one I attempted.

Spotify link - Best of 2010 – by Down In Autumn

A full update and blog post will be up shortly, but this is just a quick one to link to a Spotify playlist of some of my favourite songs from 2010 as it draws to a close.

This year has been massively transitional and a hell of a lot has happened, this is probably evident in the variation of the songs that feature on the playlist, from moody electronica to angry metal, quiet acoustic to upbeat punk, it’s actually been a really good year in terms of new music in my opinion. The yearly ‘Best Albums’ list will appear here shortly, complete the usual lengthy explanations of each choice, but that’s still a work in progress as we enter the final week of 2010, plenty of time to finish it though as this week is a quiet one at home. I may even spend some time working on a new covers Ep, hopefully to surface in early January…

Anyway, the Spotify link is at the top of this post, if you want it and the link doesn’t work, just drop me a line on Twitter or Facebook. And just for the hell of it, here’s a list my Top5 fav songs of 2010 in order..

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So here, a week early, is the latest Down In Autumn release, it’s called the Falls Apart Ep, and it’s now available to download.

Tracklist:

1. Fall Apart
2. In Time
3. Black
4. Sun Kill Moon
5. Pass Me By
6. Falls Apart

Recording Info: All songs written, performed and recorded by Thomas McCann at various times between May – September 2010 in a bedroom in East Dulwich.

Click on the image to download or right-click and ‘save as’ this link right here.

You can also now listen to three of the new songs streaming on the mp3 player on this page.

Thanks for listening.

UPDATE: The original zip file of the ep had a corrupted song file, so if you downloaded it, you’ll have a 16 second gap of silence at the beginning of the first track (Fall Apart), it’s now been amended, but if you downloaded this version, rather than download the whole thing again, you can download that one song by right clicking this link.

T

It’s Sunday evening and I’m sticking to a schedule I made. As I pat myself on the back with one hand, I’m busy typing this out with the other, and seeing as my multi-tasking skills are somewhat lacking, I’ll be keeping this nice and brief.

I blogged last week about uploading a new song this weekend, and it seems my cunning plan of self-motivating through making promises online has paid off. The song that you should hopefully find at the end of this update is a brand new recording from a 6-song ep I’ve pretty much finished. This is the first song I’ve chosen to upload from it and it has been somewhat difficult selecting which of the new songs would be the first. In the end I narrowed it down to two, then changed my mind, then narrowed it down again, before changing my mind, before narrowing it back do to the original two and tossing a coin.

So fate has decided that the new upload should be a song called Pass Me By. It’s probably the most stripped down of all the new songs on the ep, it’s quiet and simple, both in sound and lyrical content; an acoustic guitar and a vocal, with the tiniest, subtlest bits of piano, and it concerns a subject a million songs have already covered, ‘the ones that get away’.

As with all the new songs, this was mainly recorded way back at the start of the summer. Production has dragged on, but given how stripped back this song is, it was one of the first songs to be finished. Anyway, have a listen, enjoy, post a comment/criticism on Facebook, and check back soon for the rest of the ep.

(You can use the mp3 player below to play the song from this page, or right-click and ‘save as’ on the song name to download)

Down In Autumn – Pass Me By

Do you ever really learn any lessons?

I find that no matter what, I consistently make the same mistakes. over and over again, year after year, month after month, day after day. Obviously we all take certain lessons from our actions on a day-to-day basis, we learn what works and what doesn’t. For instance I know that a cheeky 5 minute snooze past my alarm in the morning means I hit rush hour traffic and that can automatically add a nice 20 mins to half an hour to my bus journey to work. So I’ve learned not to take that cheeky 5 minute snooze. But that’s easy, I can control that, what isn’t so easy to control is how you are affected by the people and situations around you.

If you listen to any of the music on this site, you might make several assumptions about the author, (whether or not they’re accurate doesn’t really matter) one possible observation might be that there can often be themes of pessimism running through a lot of the songs. That’s one I’m willing to admit to. I think it’s certainly true of most people that the ‘darker’ part of life is often much more inspiring and conducive to creating. I guess this comes simply from the fact that people love to moan, more than they love to praise, and I’m no different. Pessimism leads to the misguided presumption that it can act as a defence mechanism for disappointment, and in theory I can understand that viewpoint. but it doesnt work, it never works, and this is a lesson I never seen to keep hold of. Disappointment is inevitable, and that’s fine. But when you try to prevent the worst from happening, you’re quite possibly fighting a  losing battle, things will work out how they work out, and people will do what people want to do. It’s both exciting and terrifying, chaotic yet consistent, frustrating and yet completely natural.

Things change, things fall apart, you want to try and stop this from happening, but you secretly know it’s impossible, but it never stops you trying. This is exhausting, and pointless. But you never learn that lesson.

Weezer – Why Bother?

New ‘Falls Apart Ep’ at Halloween….