This is the second post about this album. Find out how things started in this post here.

I’ve got to an interesting point in the composition of my second Ashfeathers album. I think I’ve got a first draft track list.

9 or 10 songs (some of them still with working titles) that I think will make it onto the album. Probably. Possibly!

Are they all finished? Most are but not all. There’s a verse here or there that needs ironing out, at least one of them is more the concept of a song than an actual finished piece. Nevertheless, I can feel what this album is.

Does that mean the job is nearly done? No, not even slightly. Writing the songs is just the first step of the process. There’s still arranging and recording, mixing and mastering.

My next step is to get a first draft of guitar and vocal parts recorded along to a click track. That will give me a basis over which to try out different arrangements and parts.

My intention is to keep things pretty minimal and a little more organic sounding than the first album, but given that I really like the sound of acoustic guitar and synth, I can’t guarantee that combination of timbres won’t turn up again.

A sincere, hopeful song

One of the pictures shared in my call out for song inspiration was this pic by Richard Darby, a picture of two chess pieces, a white queen standing victorious and a black king lying on its side. That made me think of the idea of getting knocked down but always getting up again, so I started writing on that theme.

And you know what I’ve ended up with? I’ve ended up with a song that is unironically and sincerely trying to sound hopeful.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t also kinds weird. Another of the inspirations was a myth in this book about falcons, which tells the tale of a women who is in love with a man transformed into a falcon (or possibly a falcon who can transform into a man. A werefalcon) and her jealous sisters who try and trap him.

So the verses are about star-crossed lovers in myth and the chorus is about the idea of hope, of light in the darkness. At the moment I’m pretty sure it’s going to be the title track of the album, but we’ll see.

When do you get to hear this album?
Do I have a timescale on when I’ll have a finished album to share with you? No, I don’t think so. Next steps, arranging all the songs, maybe a first finished song in January. That’s not a promise though, you can’t rush art!

I’m currently in the process of writing my second Ashfeathers album. To do so, I’ve made use of a technique I’ve used a few times before – I asked people to send me pictures that might inspire songs. People did! Here’s a diary I’ve been keeping (and sharing with Ashfeathers fans via my mailing list).

September 4 2024 – Songwriting has begun!

I asked people to send pictures and I’ve had some fantastic submissions. I asked for anything beautiful, unusual, wistful, quirky, strange or awe-inspiring.

What have I done with the images so far? 

I’ve printed them out, stuck them into a brand new notebook and started brainstorming lyrics around them. At the same time I’ve started several lists – lists of possible song titles, of possible song subjects and of random interesting lines I’ve come across recently. 

My theory is this: whether you come up with songwriting ideas quickly or slowly, the percentage of good ideas remains the same. So I might as well come up with as many ideas as possible as quickly as possible, then sift through them for the good ones. 

At the same time I’ve started jamming and doodle on my guitar with microphones switched on. There are a couple of good ideas so far that I’m not going to share right now cos it’s just me playing guitars and going ‘la la la’.

So that’s where I am with the new album. We’re right at the start, but making progress. 

September 30 2024 – First new song, Distant Worlds

The first new song has turned up. It’s called song Distant Worlds. I’ve only got a rough first draft recorded, but that’s enough to know how the song will go.

Distant Worlds is about the idea that the things we see in the night sky – the moon and stars and galaxies – can transport us away from the mundane things in our normal everyday lives. 

How did the pictures help?

There were several different inspirations for the song. One of them was a picture someone shared of a sculpture that looks like someone about to take flight. I found myself wondering where they were flying off to:


And also this picture, which isn’t of the night sky, but does have ‘Moons’ in the file name and made me think about looking at the world in a different way. 



And the final ingredient was that I happened to read something that mentioned ‘common meter’ which is the poetic meter that lots of very well known songs and poems are written in – think Amazing Grace or pretty much anything by Emily Dickinson. I couldn’t remember deliberately writing in that meter before so I did for the verses. 

October 20 – Ankle Deep

The first picture I pasted into my new songwriting notebook was a black and white photo of a boy standing ankle deep in a lake with a huge net in his hands. After a few days flicking through the notebook, ruminating and noodling about on my guitar I realised he was probably trying to catch a magical creature in order to use it in some sort of spell. 

Obviously. 

So that’s what new song Ankle Deep is about.

I’ve recorded a demo version of it that I think has come out pretty well! Vocals and guitar, plus a bit of percussion, a little synth line and some rough backing vocals in the last verse. Not the finished version at all, but it’s good for a first draft. Slightly eerie chords and a 5/8 meter to create the slightly creepy atmosphere. 

So that’s where I am as of 9th November. I’ve actually got about 8 songs drafted in some form, the two above are just the ones I’ve recorded first draft videos for. I’ll keep you posted as the album develops.

Last Thursday I played an opening set for Simon Godfrey at The Bedford in Balham. I have now finally found time to write a bit more about it. 

Getting to the gig was not the most fun I’ve ever had. A couple of minutes befores I got to the train station, someone jumped in front of a train. Two minutes after that a month’s worth of rain decided to fall on me as I walked back home. 

So I ended up getting a long cab ride into that London to find the nearest tube station and what should have been a one hour journey ended up taking the best part of three hours. 

Once there I had time for a quick sound check before doors opened. My guitar worked. Gareth and I quickly ran through the song we were playing together. No need to check all of those guitar pedals, right?

The usual nervous wait and saying hello to all the lovely people who came along, and then I was finally on stage. 

After opening with an absurd lie about Simon, I began with Some of the Creatures which went down well. That was a nice warm-up before the potentially disastrous second song, West Wind. This is on my sixth album, Demon. It’s a bugger to sing, with a load of high F sharps (though to be fair these days those are less trouble because I’ve been working on them). It also has bars of 7/8, 6/8, 5/8 and 4/4 and a middle 8 with some very twisty chord shapes. 

I decided to play it anyway, and throw in the use of a looping pedal in the middle so I could play a little solo. 

I am shocked that it worked as well as it did!

After telling an absurd lie about Simon, I launched into two Ashfeathers tracks, Nothing You Can’t Buy and Mirrorworld. Mirrorworld is always tricky, which is why it’s in the set – i like a challenge. I obviously made it more of a challenge by including a looper pedal assisted solo at the end. And yes, I discovered I really should have checked those guitar pedals. The delay pedal, it turned out, was set completely wrong. What should have been a subtle delay for a bit of colour turned out to be an over the top psychedelic echo that I wasn’t expecting at all. I made it work, I don’t think anyone noticed, but that solo was not what I was planning at all. 

After the obligatory Wizards of this Town – which I introduced with the words ‘I f**king hate progressive rock. This next song is in 7/8 and it’s about wizards’, I invited Gareth onto stage to play Flow My Tears. The first time we’d played as a duo for quite a few years. 

I really enjoyed this gig. It was great to see so many of my loyal tormentors, I mean bandcamp subscribers, and seeing Simon’s set afterwards was fantastic too. He has a phenomenal voice and some great songs. What’s more the comradery and sheer joy of seeing him and his band onstage was just fantastic. As I try to do for most gigs, I’ll put up a ‘bootleg’ recording on bandcamp so you can hear all my lies, of which there were many.   

As I’m playing a gig in London supporting Simon Godfrey in about a month’s time it seemed sensible to revisit this conversation I had with him for my old podcast, the Sunday Bootleg.

“Simon,” I said, “What I’m going to do now is just say some made up band names. Please pretend you were in these bands, and tell me what it was like”.

And so here we learn about Mr Godfrey’s tenure in Gazpacho Hammer, Fartplex 5000, The Doncaster Kazoo Septet, and many more…

The gig is 26/09/2024 at the Bedford, Balham, doors at 7pm. Tickets can be found here.

I’ve been releasing music just for my bandcamp subscribers for 7 years now. Last week I posted about the 5th Indoctrination Kit I made for them, The Beast and Mr Knock. This time I’m looking back to the year before that and the 4th Indoctrination Kit, Hyperbole.

The deal I have with my lovely* bandcamp subscribers is this: You get all my music, usually earlier than everyone else, plus an exclusive EP every year that’s just for you guys. 

Over covid, with lockdowns and the world going mad, I was stuck at home in my studio even more than usual and those EPs ended up pretty much album length. That’s certainly what happened with Hyperbole, the 4th subscribers ‘EP’. 

The cover is from a homemade video I made for the song ‘Faceless Men’. The whole EP is 8 songs long and clocks in at about 35 minutes. If it was punk, you’d call that an album, right?

It has songs about aliens, crap politicians, weird creatures that come and get you when you’re not looking, mental turmoil, and odd men in gas masks hiding in an underground bunker. Classic pop songs. 

Faceless Men

The first song from it was Faceless Men for which I made an actual music video with me singing at the camera and doing a bit of acting in a gas mask and stuff. This song is a little bit more metal than some of my stuff. Not full on metal, but I turned the guitars up and put some actual RIFFS in the middle bit.

Like The Beast and Mr Knock and a couple of other projects, my Hyperbole EP was inspired in part by pictures sent to me by my bandcamp subscribers. Pictures I had asked for that is. Not the kind of pictures you just started thinking about.  

Cool, weird or creepy or strange pictures that could inspire songs. Faceless Men was inspired by a picture of odd men in gas masks sitting around a dinner table. Barbed Wire Webs was inspired by a picture of a spider, but also a picture of a sort of retro scifi tower in the middle of a field. We Look Up To The Sky was inspired by a proper actual picture from a proper actual talented photographer named Graham who sent me a picture of what looked very much like a stonehenge style standing stone lit up in yellow light. That isn’t what it actually is, but that’s what it sort of looked like. 

As I say, it’s one of several songwriting techniques I’ve used to find new ideas for songs. Look at the picture, then start free writing based on the first thing that comes into your head. Usually for me, what I’m trying to do is get myself into the mind of some fictional character so I can figure out what they’re thinking or feeling and write a song from there. 

So these bandcamp subscribers are actually useful sometimes.

Hyperbole

Hyperbole was the title track from my 4th Subscribers EP. It was inspired by hearing a politician mispronounce the word ‘hyperbole’ twice in quick succession. That wouldn’t be too bad a thing, but in between someone else pronounced it correctly. 

Now, I know, I know that criticizing someone for mispronouncing a word is not fair. Usually that means they discovered the word by reading and that’s definitely a good thing. 

But this was Nadhim Zahawi who used taxpayer’s money to heat his stables – his stables! – and had to resign after his own tax affairs turned out to be potentially dodgy. 

I dislike the man and am glad he is no longer a politician. 

So this is very unusual political subject matter for me, but still a fun song, eh?

If you’d like to hear all of Hyperbole, read the various lies in the Indoctrination Guide, and generally support my music you can find out more here.

*Are they all lovely? No. No, they’re not. But you’ve to be polite, right?

This is the 7th year in a row I’ve run my bandcamp subscriptions, and the 7th year in a row I have made my (fool)hardy subscribers and Indoctrination Kit – a CD and Booklet full of absurd stories and lies about that year’s musical endeavours. 

While I’m working on the latest Indoctrination Kit, I thought I’d have a look back at previous ones. 

Year 5 was all about The Beast And Mr Knock, a set of 5 songs and an accompanying short story. It was all about a group of children with various supernatural abilities who were kidnapped, and who escaped with the help of The Beast. 

It’s proper full on madness – what’s going on this song right is that two people are seeking revenge for what was done to them. And what was done is that a load of children with the supernatural ability to take other people into their lucid dreams – were captured and forced to use that ability to entertain various unpleasant men. The children were kept in line by the fearsome Mr Knock.  But one of the children was able to summon The Beast to help them. Two escaped, and now they hope to exact revenge. 

It was very much a collaborative affair. I asked people to send me pictures that might inspire songs. Knowing the sort of thing I write about, my lovely bandcamp subscribers sent me a load of creepy pictures. Weird houses, empty rooms, a wooden mask hanging on a door, and best of all an entire set of pictures from an actual abandoned asylum somewhere in America that subscriber Doug happened to have visited (let’s not ask too many details as to why). 

I printed ‘em out, stuck them in a new notebook and got to work. As with many of my songs the breakthrough was when I got inside the main characters head and realised what their story was. I ended up writing a couple of pages of their inner monologue about the house that haunted them from their childhood, and the rest of the EP came from there. 

If you’d like to know more about my bandcamp subscription, you can find more info over here.

Is there anyone in your life who has gone weird after watching too much Youtube? Been taken in by conspiracies, decided that science and facts are the enemy? That’s who this song is about.

I can’t say there’s a specific person close to me who has been taken in by things like that, to be fair, but it’s something you see a lot in the world. There was a time when we all basically agreed on what the truth was. It started somewhere in the 20th century, and carried on all the way through til maybe the late 90s. There were a small handful of TV channels and radio stations, there was a mass media culture and whether it was correct or not, we basically all shared an understanding of the facts. 

We’d disagree how to react to those facts, but the facts were the facts.  

At some point that began to break down. Rather than mass media, we now have fragmented media with a thousand channels selling us a thousand different versions of the truth. There still is an objective truth, but far too many people don’t understand that a talking head on a social media channel isn’t a reasonable way to discover it. 

Coincidentally, shortly after I released this song as a single in 2022, the author Naomi Klein published a book called Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirrorworld which uses exactly the same metaphor to explore exactly the same subject matter. I guess it’s not that unique a metaphor, huh?

So this song is about the sense of loss the main character feels, watching a family member succumb to internet craziness, losing themselves in a parallel world of alternative facts, stuck in a mirror world where they can’t be reached. 

Its soundworld is centred on an open D major tuning – a tuning used on a few songs on Worldbuilding – with the guitar part often equal to the vocal rather than just an accompaniment. The backing is sparse synths and some guitar countermelodies.

It’s one of the most difficult to play on the album and when I’ve tried it live a few times I haven’t quite got it right. In particular I keep getting the move from the final verse to the final chorus wrong. Not sure why, except the timing of it always seems to elude me. 

For a while Mirrorworld was going to be the first song on the album. I only changed it because I thought Nothing You Can’t Buy was a better opener because the vocal starts right at the beginning of the song, whereas Mirrorworld has an instrumental intro. But it was the first song I wrote for Worldbuilding and remains the blueprint for the album’s sound. 

Next up: Cuckoo.

Everything I’ve ever written has been about fictional worlds. I love fantasy, scifi, speculative fiction and my songs tend to tell those kind of stories. 

Sometimes it’s very obvious, sometimes it’s kinda oblique, but all my songs are from the point of view of a character, telling you about their world. 

So that’s what this first Ashfeathers album is about – 9 songs about characters in their fictional worlds.

But there’s also the idea of a ‘sound world’. The instruments, voices, textures and gestures you choose to create your music. So as well as building worlds with the lyrics, I’m building worlds with sound. World building. 

I’ve released 8 albums prior to this one, almost all under my own name – Tom Slatter. Ashfeathers has such a different sound world to those songs that I decided a new name was needed, and here we are. 

But the lyrics of the first song – Nothing You Can’t Buy – could absolutely have been on a Tom Slatter album. 

This song is about a city in the desert where you can buy anything – physical things, maps and knives, cages, cars, diamonds, hot dogs, but also abstract ideas like broken hearts, broken promises. 

The character singing revealed themselves to me gradually, pretty much as happens when you listen to the song. First he’s walking through this bizarre market, looking at all the weird stuff you can buy, but then the chorus comes he tells you he bought a map, a knife, someone else’s name and revenge. 

Cos you can buy revenge in this place. 

And despite the kinda sweet sound world – acoustic guitars and chimes and stuff, there’s something sinister going here. By the bridge he’s talking about accusations dogging your every move, and an old man in the market in the city you can pay to make your past sins disappear. And by that point you know this guy ain’t in a happy place. 

And it means you’ve got a juxtaposition I always enjoy – a singable melodic chorus with dark sinister lyrics. 

Cos by the end our character is talking about how he could have bought happiness, but to do that would mean raising someone he loves from the dead, and thats a pandora’s box, cos if one person can get raised from the dead, others can too and he can’t afford that. 

I assume cos he’s put some many people there and he doesn’t want to have to face them after what he did. 

Or something like that. Lots of writers will tell you, sometimes it feels lik the song or the story kinda takes over and you’re acting as a conduit for the words rather than creating them yourself. You are of course, except maybe with a bit of help from your subconscious brain – but that’s what it felt like when i got into writing this song. It wrote itself very quickly. Like he felt he wanted to confess to me. 

So that’s that first song ‘Nothing You Can’t Buy’. Next time I’ll talk about the second song, MirrorWorld.  

I am very happy to be supporting I Am The Manic Whale on 5th April at the Facebar in Reading.

I’ll be playing a solo acoustic set of songs about love, dancing, and ‘waving your hands in the air like you just don’t care’*.

Here’s the ticket link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/…/i-am-the-manic-whale-tom…

*This is a lie. I’ll sing about wizards and demons and murder and stuff. Obviously.

‘What are your influences? I’ve never heard anything like it.’ a guitarist called Andy said to me on Thursday night. I took this as a compliment. There was definitely not a look of fear in his eyes.

In the last seven days I’ve played two gigs.

Two? Two in seven days? I hardly ever play gigs, what’s going on?

It just so happened I was asked. Ever now and then I put a few feelers out to find gigs, but my main policy on gigging is that if someone asks I say yes, and apart from that I don’t really gig.

Why is that? Don’t musicians want to perform?

Yes, I love performing I would happily do it a lot more. But music is not my full time gig and I am committed to only doing musical things that bring me joy, given I don’t have bags of time to commit to it. At the start of 2022 I put a lot of effort into trying to find gigs. The result of that was I ended up with about 15 gigs in the diary for the first 6 months of the year, all but two of which never actually happened.

All right, it was bad timing. We were only just coming out of Covid, things were in flux, ticket sales were hard to predict. But that was an awful lot of time and effort spent on admin that could have been spent on new music.

So, for the moment we are back to my main gig policy. Do ’em if someone asks!

And that’s how I ended up playing the two gigs I did this week. Chris Parkins off’f London Prog Gigs asked if I wanted to support IT at the Camden Club, and Steve Jones (who I had contacted back in early 2022 during that rare bout of gig admin) who promotes Corn on the Cob, a acousticy, Americana ish night at The Hertford Corn Exchange.

The Camden Club is a new venue in an old building, having opened about 6 months ago. It is, it might shock you to know, in Camden, in that London.

The gig was a very civilised Sunday afternoon affair, with me opening followed by instrumental prog outfit Pandamoanium and the aforementioned prog ROCKers IT. I like IT, particularly because unlike a great many prog rock outfits, they don’t ignore the second half of that genre name and are happy to actually rock every now and then.

Pandamoanium were also lots of fun, great players with to my ear a bit of an Iron Maiden influence in chord and mode choices. Although that double-neck guitar had far too many strings. You don’t need that many.

My set was a mix of new and old – two songs off this year’s subscribers EP The Beast and Mr Knock plus a couple of brand new songs from the acoustic project I’m currently working on, including There’s Nothing You Can’t Buy. Here’s a video of that:

This was a great gig and being a prog crowd my weird stuff kinda fit in. No-one thinks you’re weird for playing songs in odd metres at a prog gig.

Corn on the Cob was also a great gig, but I was definitely more of a fish out of water there. I was part of the first act, which was a songwriters round – three acts on stage, playing one song each. I hadn’t done that before and I really enjoyed it. I was on stage with Pete Crossley, and Kate Ellis and playing right next to two other completely different songwriters was a nice contrast.

Now you may know, I like to get a bit of laughter from the audience between songs. I regard laughter as an appropriate reaction to the world cos let’s face it nothing really makes sense and being all serious about stuff is, well, unrealistic and a bit adolescent. So I introduced my silly songs in the way I usually do – this one’s about a brain in a jar, this one’s about evil clowns. And a few people laughed, a few people smiled. I think I got the right reaction.

Hard to tell isn’t it? I mean people laugh cos they think something’s funny. but they also laugh when they’re nervous or scared.

It was probably fine.

But then Andy, Kate Ellis’s guitar player did ask what my influences were as he hadn’t heard anything like it before, and there might have been a bit of fear in his eye. Hard to tell.

I’m sure it was fine…