All posts tagged becca williams

Writing For Others

Friday 19 September, 2014
Tags: becca williams, snowapple

Over the years I’ve heard a lot of songwriters refer to their songs as babies. “Oh no, of course I don’t have a favourite, they’re ALL my babies!”

Though I’m as protective over my back catalog as the next writer I don’t think of my compositions in those terms. To me they feel more like foundlings and strays, lost dogs that I’ve given a bath and haircut to. I certainly don’t think I’ve birthed any of them, the raw ideas drift in from who-knows-where and then I scrub them up with a few fruity metaphors, the musical equivalent of teaching an orphan table manners in a Victorian novel before it turns out they’re actually the long lost heir of a viscount.

In the end, refer to these little creations how you will, it all amounts to the same thing. Despite the dubious sense of misplaced ownership one has over any artistic product derived from myriad social factors, there is an inevitable sense of pride and protectiveness over anything one has composed. For me the greatest sense of achievement is when a song goes off on its own path. When they are adopted by other performers, in whatever style, it’s such a thrill to witness a song filtered through another person’s outlook. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.

This emotion has a nervous and unpredictable twin though. One that accompanies a burgeoning desire to will these covers into existence rather than simply letting them surface unbidden. More and more I feel compelled to write for others as I become increasingly frustrated with my own limitations, boxed in by gloomy premonitions of how certain species of song might develop under my sole guardianship. So I picture another artist and write with them in mind. Sometimes this sense of distance perversely brings a song even closer (for instance I wrote “Tonight” for Liz Green but rarely omit it from my own live performances, indeed it’s The Bedlam Six’s regular soundcheck tune).

But terror comes with the reveal. Approaching a band or artist with a song you’ve written for them evokes the same emotions I used to feel as an adolescent asking a girl to go out with me. One feels decidedly prone. What if they don’t like it? What if they think you’re a creep for doing that? What if the whole wretched ordeal is something you can never get past, always skulking in the background of any future projects, the embarrassing rejected song – irreversible and unwelcome.

I decided I wanted to write a song for Dutch band Snowapple, a group famed for their amazing vocal harmonies who joined the Debt Records roster last year. My own vocal style naturally lends itself to rapid consonants so I was particularly keen to incorporate more lingering vowels and a sort of tidal urgency pushing at an overall slowness.
The song is called Widow. Widow is a beautiful word if one dissociates it with the morbid connotations. If you can. (I can’t)

I was overjoyed when they told me they liked it (the blushing teenage version of me nervously proffering a bunch of flowers mercifully unspurned!). They decided to record it with Becca Williams (another singer I’m immensely fond of) and the result is an absolute dream come true for me.

Here is the result:

Birthday Blues… and Folk… and Jazz… and Rock…

Monday 21 July, 2014
Tags: alabaster deplume, becca williams, dancehouse theatre, felix hagan, five years in debt, honeyfeet, ivan campo, manchester, music industry, richard barry, snowapple, t e yates, walk

There are some events that you just can’t see past. They loom on the horizon, impassable, immovable and as dubiously perilous as Don Quixote’s windmill giants. The Debt Records fifth anniversary (“Five Years In Debt”) was one of those.

I spend a lot of my time booking shows, mostly for myself, sometimes for acts on the label as part of their promo schedules for new releases. Every time a promoter has been in touch over the last few weeks asking for a tech spec or a biog I’ve looked at the email and thought “but… how can anyone seriously comprehend a time AFTER the Debt Records fifth anniversary? How can anything be planned? How do we know what will exist in such an uncertain future?” as if our birthday showcase were the musical equivalent of the fall of capitalism or an imagined Second Coming.

But that’s the funny thing about context. Everyone has their own. And each personal context tends to envelop us like a snug cocoon – there’s an entire universe embroidered on the inside blocking out a world of forgotten indifference beyond the slimmest of walls.

And now it’s over. Done. Past tense.

It was a wonderful event. Actually I’m amazed there were no breakdowns – mental or technical. We managed to cram representatives from every one of our current acts into about three and a half hours; with full-band sets from Honeyfeet, Felix Hagan & The Family, Snowapple, Walk and T. E. Yates interspersed with stripped down appearances from Ivan Campo, Alabaster dePlume, Becca Williams, Richard Barry and me. Time was short and expectations were high. The stage crew worked miracles.

Inevitably it was a relatively nostalgic affair. The venue was papered with old event posters and we had monitors in strategic positions looping all the music videos from the past five years. But then looking back has never been more fashionable. People reminisce about experiences while they’re still having them. Social media is full of dreamily filtered images of would-be memories from five minutes ago. We seem to be living in a temporal future imperfect where no verb is ever satisfactorily conjugated.

Of course there is always more back than forward at a birthday celebration, no matter how hopeful and future-conscious. In fact we kind of designed this gig with that in mind – our party took place in the same venue as our first showcase back in 2009 and I even wore the same suit and stetson (though the waistband was a little tighter this time round!).

This retrospective impulse seems apt for a record label. Notions of the past, present and future are staple themes of popular music. Indeed, the recording process itself is dependent on capturing a moment with the intention of creating some kind of immortal past striding into an unsuspecting future. Even the spontaneity is studied.

Little labels like ours are very much like bands. They depend on the enthusiasm of the contributors far more than financial common sense or a stable infrastructure. Once the passion goes, everything goes. Occasionally I look back and marvel we’ve lasted five years, but mostly I’m amazed that it’s only been five years. It now feels like something I’ve always been a part of.

Like most labels we were very naive at the start. But I think the enduring exuberance of Debt Records is a consequence of that naivete rather than in spite of it. In my short introductory speech I mentioned how we still have no idea what we’re doing. It got a laugh but I wasn’t joking. The music industries have been changing drastically ever since we started – they were changing then and they still haven’t settled on a “new way” that we can all agree on – indeed, there’s still no hint that this business is going to settle down any time soon. Some people still swear by CDs, for others it’s vinyl or nothing, many have abandoned all physical formats in favour of the mp3. And those are just the people who want to purchase music – that’s the easy stuff! More than the delivery mechanism, the very idea of ownership is changing with the proliferation of streaming services. Every time I go to a music conference I chat to label directors who don’t know how they’re going to weather all these changes without either suffering huge financial losses or enduring unpleasant compromises.

If you ever meet anyone at a label who confidently informs you they know what they’re doing, that they’ve got this business figured, well… consider yourself warned: you’ve either met a villain or an idiot.

So I’m optimistic because we still don’t know what’s going on. We’re still innocents. The records being released this year (whatever their chosen format or promotional angle) are of the highest caliber of creativity I’ve encountered. Everyone is pushing forward. Everyone is doing their best and most ambitious work. I have no idea if this stuff will appear on compact disc, wax cylinder, piano roll or download. But it will exist. And that’s good enough for me.

Here’s to many more years of being in Debt.