From Roots to Branches

I’ve never used this blog to discuss anything particularly personal – politics aren’t entirely a no-go zone as far as I’m concerned, but my other projects and lives don’t really belong here. But it’s the start of a New Year, and it always takes us a little time to ramp up to the regular posts, so I hope you’ll forgive me a little self-indulgence.

As will become clear shortly, one of the reasons I write this blog is that I’m an exceptionally untalented musician myself – but I did give it a try, with two albums released in 2002 and 2003 respectively. For years, I’ve been meaning to go back and remaster them, and finally, about six months ago, I started work on a cleaned up version of the first album From Roots to Branches.

The first track on the album is Landscape #1, which is supposed to be broad and atmospheric:

If that’s a bit dull for you, I think this is one of my favourites, Landscape #2:

There are nine tracks on the album in total, some more “pop” than others, but honestly I think now that the most accessible tracks were on the three singles, Landscape #1, Forgotten Summer, and Illusions of Twilight. I’ve compiled all these together with a whole load of previously unreleased material on a new compilation called Fallen Leaves. This is the first track I worked on for the whole project, started in late 2001, and entitled Charmed Life:

I was learning all the time, and the 2003 recordings fixed a lot of the things people had pointed out with the originals, so the single version of Illusions of Twilight is, to my mind, considerably better than the original album version:

Both From Roots to Branches and its companion album Fallen Leaves are available now, completely for free, from my Bandcamp page. If you download either, I’ll also send you a free copy of The Branch Line EP, which is a collection of demos and unreleased versions.

The second album Shadowsphere will follow in the first half of 2018.

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