I failed February Album Writing Month this year.

Can you fail a task that you set yourself and that isn’t monitored by anyone else? Yeah, the challenge with February Album Writing Month (FAWM) is to write 14 brand new songs in a month, but no-one’s policing it. There’s just a lovely site full of nice supportive people, sharing their songs and making comments.

But for 16 years I’ve been trying to get to 14 songs each February. I’ve only ever done it once and this year I got to 3. Yes, a whole 3.

All right, would those 3 songs have been written without FAWM? No, probably not. And am I proud of them? Yes, I am.

It’s not a failure at all is it?

The truth is, the first six weeks of the year have mostly been a write off for me. There’s a horrible set of winter colds going round I’ve had all of them. Even getting to three songs is a bit of an achievement.

So anyway, here are my three new songs! All rough demos, at various different stages of completion but all worth listening to.

1. An Ode to Joydon

One of the aforementioned lovely people suggested using phone numbers to come up with a melody – a 1 for the root note of a scale, 2 for the second and so on (ignoring the 0s). My mum happens to be moving out of the house I grew up on a road called Joydon Drive, so I decided to use that phone number.

Also I’d been listening to a Dvorak string quartet and watching some videos about Bartok’s axis of keys idea. And all of that got mushed up in my head and came out as a string quartet.

It has an ABA structure, with the As sort of in F minor and the Bs in B major.

Years since I wrote this sort of instrumental, and sure it’s a rough first go but I’m pretty happy with it. The recording’s just fake midi string sounds, sorry, but you get the idea.

2. Sun Stands Still

Sun Stands Still will be on the next Ashfeathers album. I’m sure you can hear why – it’s all acoustic guitars and singy bits. I’m really happy with the lyrics.

Late last year I asked people on my Ashfeathers mailing list to send me pictures that might inspire songs. People did and there were quite a few wintery pics. So I’ve had winter-song ideas running around my head for a few weeks now. Here’s what turned up.

The video is just a little loop of a lake near me that looked particularly still and wintery one morning.

Guitars are in open D major: D A F# A D

Lyrics:

Mrs Tatterhood, she digs a hole
And burrows down to lie under the snow
Mr Horace swims near every day
cracks the ice and lets his skin turn blue

And Lewis has found some fireworks
He’s lighting one and aiming at his sister
In a shower of sparks he misses and sets light to a tree

The sun stands still
The cold is not a thing to fear
The sun stands still
This time round will disappear
The secrets buried in the snow will melt away and let us go
Between the years we’re all still standing still

The winter’s a lonely time for John
The time of year his wife of 10 years left him
Every year he carves her sculpture out of ice
Then drinks some whiskey and melts it with a blowtorch

The Mercy twins know how to save the year
you sacrifice some creature in the night
At midnight you slit its throat
A sacrament
An offering that makes the daylight grow

The sun stands still
The cold is not a thing to fear
The sun stands still
This time round will disappear
The secrets buried in the snow will melt away and let us go
Between the years we’re all still standing still

3. In The Darkness

I only had an hour for this one. The main guitar idea was already hanging out in a rough bit of video on my phone, but the rest came together in that hour. Given the time taken, it’s all right isn’t it? I can definitely see this one coming together into a finished piece.

Lyrics:

Is this holy? Maybe it’s as holy as anything can be
Is it sacred? When the only prayers that mean a thing are to yourself
Here, here in the darkness that we both know

Floating here we orbit each other
The gravity’s what holds us near
Eventually we’ll crash or drift away

Is it empty? If it’s empty then you fill it up yourself
Is it broken? If it’s broken then you’re just like everyone else

Here, here in the darkness that we both know

Floating here we orbit each other
The gravity’s what holds us near
Eventually we’ll crash or drift away

But here in the dark we’re burning away
Here in the dark we’re staying
But here in the dark we’re burning away

Floating here we orbit each other
The gravity’s what holds us near
Eventually we’ll crash or drift away

So today is the solstice, the end of the year and the beginning of the new. It seems an apt moment to reflect on the 12 months just gone. 

Musically, 2024 was a big success.

Oh did you become a big star and sell lots of albums, then Tom?

No, no I didn’t. But that’s not how I measure success. 

It was successful because I released the first Ashfeathers album, World Building. 9 songs about fictional worlds, from the bizarre city where you can buy anything including metaphysical concepts, to the real one of online propaganda, and the lonely-yet-hopeful one where a reclusive poet hides his love odes rather than tell anyone about his feelings. 

The inspirations for Ashfeathers were twofold. I wanted to make use of the new acoustic guitar I had, and I wanted to do something in a very different tone to the solo music I’d released up to that point. Most Tom Slatter music is tongue in cheek, still telling stories, but sort of comedy horror/scifi rather than the more serious (albeit sometimes whimsical) tone of Ashfeathers. 

I think I achieved that, both with World Building and the follow-up EP World Ending. 

World ending also includes What You’re Aiming For, which I think is the best song I’ve written in the last twelve months. 

 What’s next for Ashfeathers?

I’ve got a new album in the works. The lovely people on my Ashfeathers mailing list have shared lots of pictures to help with the songwriting process and with their help I’ve got a brand new set of songs that I’ve already started recording. We’re well on the way there and I’m hoping to keep the recording process simple for this one so in theory it shouldn’t take long to finish recording. But as ever, I’m not going to promise a specific date. It will be done when it is done!

What about the rest?

The other big news of the year is the launch of my new band High Wire Act. If Ashfeathers is the nice, accessible acoustic side of my songwriting, this is the big loud electric-guitar-and-drums aspect. Big riffs, big feelings. That’s the idea. It’s trying to explore the idea ‘what if all those 90s alt rock bands I liked had had band members who were emotionally well adjusted, but still wrote the same kind of music?’. 

Two songs out so far, Lifeline and These Ghouls Won’t Leave Me Alone. More to come in the new year. 

What about a new Tom Slatter album?

Yeah, it had got to the point that I can now legitimately talk about Tom Slatter music as a distinct thing from my other acts. This has the strange side effect of making me sound like a pro-wrestler talking about themselves in the third person. Can you smell what the Slatter is cooking?

There will be more music under that name, but I’m not putting a date on it. It will happen when it happens!

There was a new Tom Slatter song on my bandcamp subscribers EP. It was called I Stagger Through These Stars and it does point me in the right direction I think. It’s from the point of view of someone making a rambling, half-coherent speech inspired by a drunken epiphany that he can only half remember. There’s something in the sort of sub-Beckett nonsense of the words that speaks to me. I’m wondering if the next Tom Slatter album should be a deliberate rejection of the very notion of meaning in song lyrics.

Aren’t all your songs that anyway?

Yeah, but this time it will be deliberate!

What’s next then?

I measure my success as a musician by the music I write and record. If I’m proud of those recordings I am successful. I’m very proud of this year’s recordings, especially Ashfeathers and High Wire Act. So that’s a successful year. 

2025 will be all about the second Ashfeathers album and the first High Wire Act album. I can’t wait for you to hear them. 

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.