The greatest congratulations to my friends Foy and Joanne Vance – baby Ella Naomi was born yesterday at 10:45am Belfast time, but I only got the text message this morning… Unbelievable… the strange circles of life keep spiralling to infinity and we’re just clinging on, hoping for some kind of rollercoaster ride to something. I am over the moon for them, just imagining the big smiles on that boy’s face.
Foy is one of the most amazing musicians I have ever met. Liam Bradley (who played drums for Van Morrison, Ronan Keating etc.) says that Foy’s album is still the best thing he’s ever worked on. I would have to agree – I had the privilege of producing it. I hope he gets a website up soon so you can enjoy it as much as we all did…
After the late night with my old mate Hartleyface, I surfaced at the crack of noon, thinking of old Tom Waits and how I used to go to sleep to the tune of Nighthawks At The Diner when I lived in Japan, in the glory days of the CD DiscMan. Even that sounds like ancient history. The speed of our lives is getting ridiculous. I’m just listening to the waves crashing, birds singing outside, wondering where all this is going at such breakneck pace.
I’m fundamentally a slow kind of person. That’s why I prefer tea to coffee (mark my words, tea will come to represent slowness and become very trendy in big cities… I’ve been saying it for a while. People will talk about coffee in the same way they talk about cocaine – ‘Its SO eighties man’)… time to brew, time taken to pause your life for a moment. Like Guinness too… I miss a decent pint of that, it has to be said. Escaping one’s Irishness is never easy in a bar.
0:27 I just got a sudden glow of satisfaction there when I realised I had brewed a pot of Madagascan Vanilla tea which was sitting behind me… just forgot about it in the midst of putting up the latest version of the HARE (HAppytown Remix Engine). Spent ages on it today, putting in a sequencer feature, where you can arrange the song now as well as play the loops in sync with each other. Detailed instructions will come with the final package, but for now lets just have a play. We’re all fumbling in the dark anyway so no matter…
The day has vanished before me in all this laptop-fuelled mind-enigma nonsense. I was a machine… food… program… food… practised some guitar (just rehearsing some of the album tunes on my old acoustic as one-man performances)… tea… programmed… blah, blah and so the beard grows. But I’m enjoying putting this remix tool together. It will give you a chance to hear how the parts fit together… eventually we’ll have a competition for best remix.