I have recorded a new album. For more see below. It will shortly be available for download on many of the usual service but it has appeared first on Emusic. You can download “Postcards from the Hedge” here.
To try and figure out my life I needed some useful imagery. I figured that my life is a lot like my relationship with plants and nature, some may say that is a lazy metaphor, a cliché. I don’t really care. Even if truth becomes hackneyed and worn, it is still truth. Rather like Chauncey Gardiner, in Hal Ashby’s brilliant ‘Being There’, he played the part of a man who was a childlike cipher for things that may or may not be true, and people were so empty they saw something in him that filled their own need. So I think, the hedge is a good metaphor, and in this context it represents the world or my perception of that world. As Bishop George Berkeley postulated “The world is in the mind, not the mind in the world”.
My life has also been a winding and rather spiral type affair, non-linear, lateral.. so now as an aging Punk Rock Hippy.. I am now settled for the first time in my life. More happy in my skin than I have ever been and this album is both a look back and a look inwards, over the years that have brought me here.
So back to the hedge, after spending many years either under the hedge, out of the hedge, fighting with the hedge, living at the hedge, and now in general trimming the hedge – here are some songs about my experiences.
The album ‘Postcards from the Hedge’ is about many things. The search for identity and the divine. Madness, alienation, finding love, as well as travel and cows.
It has taken nearly 15 years for some of these songs to finally see the light of day. I do hope some of them resonate with you in someway. They catalogue my journey and an honest and genuine desire to figure out life, or at least my small place in it, and deal with some of the big questions. I don’t care how daft and uncool it is to say that out loud, but I am not a very complex man, so why not be clear and voice what I think in a simple manner?
The quest for identity and meaning is a valuable one and in many ways the most important journey we shall ever undertake. Without it we are nothing more than rocks lost at the foot of the mountain, seeds on the breeze or empty ciphers transfixed and hypnotised by pretty pictures beamed into our home. Oh dear.
I am not interested in shallow and superficial appraisals of what this record is or is not, and in a sense I am not really concerned about how this record is received, as I kinda made it for myself. I feel now like I have been freed somewhat and can move on and explore other things. Making this record has been like giving birth to a small talented elephant or like watching a mountain rise a couple of millimeters a year.
I am, as a result of all that, vainly presenting the songs to you for a listen if you care to take a glimpse inside a strangers head.
Many thanks to Robert Waterhouse for his great double bass playing on many of these tracks. I play all of the guitar, drums and some bass and its me warbling throughout. Also big thanks to Alun Smyth who engineered and helped me produce the record.
This album is dedicated to my friend Aodhan O Gormain who has sadly left us for a higher world and we are wanting in his absence. Slan go foil a chara.
Om Tat Sat
Josh
