Retrospective - Digging for Bones

 It's been a long while since some of these were released to I've decided to work through my back catalogue and re-introduce the old stuff to any new listeners.

I think it must have been in 2006 or '07 when a couple of people approached me after a gig and told me they were setting up a record label, and they wanted me to be one of their first artists.

Now the obvious reaction to this would be, "pull the other one, it's got bells on," but I did actually know one of the chaps. He was a local promoter and had a small live sound business. So it was a bit more credible.

The chap he introduced me to had been running a studio in Leeds but he and his partner had to move when the building owner sold up. 

Cutting a long story short, the studio duo were linking up with the promoter (and his protégé) to form a new label and they were looking for a couple of acoustic acts to start their roster. 

Which is how I found myself going along to Sleep Safe studio just outside York and recording my first EP with SOUP records. About which I shall tell you a bit more below.

https://drewstephenson.bandcamp.com/album/digging-for-bones

Track 1 - Cirencester. OK, let's get this out of the way up front. This song has nothing to do with Cirencester. Nothing at all. It ended up with this name because the drummer in a previous band misheard the first line, "The silence of the siren's sister…" and referred to it as 'that Cirencester song' and that's what stuck. The title I would have chosen is 'Axum Bridge' because the basic idea behind it was of a couple of people following the journey of the Ark of the Covenant to its apparent resting place in Axum, Ethiopia. The subtext being that even when we're travelling down the most quiet and abandoned of roads, we are still staying within the boundaries of what is already known. "Segosa madela" means absolutely nothing by the way, it's just a nice sounding collection of syllables that fitted the end of the track. Because of the musical simplicity of this track it's been pretty much the first thing I've taught every band over the last 15 years so there are at least three different versions of this track out there in various formats.

Track 2 - Lost. The lyrics for this were mostly written on the train between London and York; there's a big white building - it might not actually be a house - near the railway line at Retford that can be identified even at high speed. The second verse then references some of my memories of growing up in various countries in the tropics, Kipling's 'high-ceiled rooms that the trades blow through'; and how sometimes those memories aren't so helpful.

The middle 8 was inspired by watching a documentary on the disappearance of the Aral sea, and how some of the locals (who had lost their living as fishermen) had taken to salvaging scrap from the old chemical / biological weapons testing facility. It had previously been an island but was now just another part of the dried sea bed and was walkable.

Recording this was tricky as, for some reason, I always played and sang this very quietly - I think we ended up with 8 microphones being used! I've only sung it live once at a gig with a particularly special audience. 

Track 3 - Mugged In Spain. Probably the song that did more to get me signed than any other. It's essentially a song about a terrorist committing and getting away with an atrocity of some kind by making himself into a credible victim of an unrelated crime. It was written not long after the Madrid bombings and I was channelling quite a bit of anger about that - which is probably why I stood out from the usual singer-songwriters at the time. We laid down the core of the track and then the drums were added later when I wasn't there. I think it was the first time I went through the whole 'oh my god what have you done?' to 'actually that's pretty cool' cycle. This is something I still go through every time anyone adds something to a song I've written, and frequently when I'm adding things myself.

Track 4 - OK. Everyone has an ex-girlfriend song (or ex-boyfriend if that's your preference), I had a dead girlfriend song. This was one of those tracks that shouldn't really have worked live but with the above short intro I was generally playing it into a silent room. The working title for this EP was Five Short Songs About Death, this track might have had something to do with that. But it is actually a happy (ish) song.

Track 5 - Stressed. The opening and closing lines are from Ganges Pilot, a poem expanded from Rudyard Kipling's The Light That Failed. It's kind of about dying at your desk and not being too bothered about it. I think when I was first signed the label had an idea that this first EP would be five tracks of voice and guitar and that would be about it. I soon disabused them of that notion and made the point that if they were going to have all these cool toys in the studio then I was definitely going to use them. A bass player friend of mine has mocked me about the radio bit for years now, I've never really understood why though.

The cover photo was by kind permission of Heather Zibbel.

And that was it, my first professionally recorded music. The epilogue for this tale is that about a year ago I went to the tip with the remaining hundreds of unsold CDs and scrapped them. Kids, make sure you know your audience before investing in physical goods.