Cycle of life inspires time for reflection

A journalist who has kept two musical projects simmering away - the solo-driven Seafieldroad and his band Swimmer One - Eaton-Lewis has crafted an album that weaves threads of the political into the personal.

"The Winter Of 88 idea came from a preoccupation with numbers," he admits. "I started recording music in 1988. I was a schoolboy with a cheap keyboard and two microphones, trying to sound like the Pet Shop Boys. I realised that I'd been making songs for almost 25 years, and that I was about to turn 40. Also, my dad was about to turn 80. So those numbers prompted a bit of soul-searching, if not quite a full-blown mid-life crisis. What had I achieved in those 25 years, those 40? What was the point of it all?"

The result, he says, is "an album about politics, and faith, and family, and grief, and all of the above and also none of the above". Musically, it has a fuller sound than the stripped-back vocal and piano tracks of its self-titled predecessor from 2011, adding choral arrangements, strings and live brass at points. Lyrically, it is on even stronger ground, a genuinely poetic statement that looks out to physical seascapes and political landscapes and inwards to conflicting emotions.

"I was thinking about winter a lot," Eaton-Lewis explains. "I'd written a song called Don't Let The Winter Freeze Your Heart, a sort of consolation song for people, like me, who were feeling like they'd reached a half way point in their lives and weren't sure what they had to show for it. It's a reminder (partly to myself) that these feelings pass, that despite getting older emotionally you often return to spring and summer again, feeling a new sense of purpose and direction, that life isn't one long slide from spring to summer to autumn to winter, but a cyclical process.

"I'd also written a song called The World Is Just Noise, which was inspired by my dad gradually losing his memory and his focus and the distance that was growing between us as a result. So that felt a bit wintry too, and I thought it might be interesting to write a whole album of winter-themed songs."

Ultimately the album stretches beyond that direct winter theme, by working through ideas of islands and coastlines (Eaton-Lewis had just moved to Portobello), of evolution and family (he is dad to a young daughter), of mortality and religion (his late father "raging against the dying of the light - and me thinking about one day doing the same").

"And then there's the referendum," he adds, "which was preoccupying me so much that it ended up in the lyrics of three songs without me really intending it to. This Road Won't Build Itself is the most obvious example. For me, the referendum debate was very much about the kind of country I wanted my children to grow up in, so it feels appropriate to explore that on an album about family."

The number 88 has a tangible presence on the title track, as fellow musician Drew Wright (who records as Wounded Knee) recites a list of 88 names - the first 88 people who bought the album as part of a crowd-funded, pre-ordered project.

"A lot of the songs are about grief, or loss, or feeling like you're losing connection with people, so it's been really nice to have, at the heart of that, an attempt to build a very solid connection between me and 88 people," Eaton-Lewis says. "It's an odd thing - the crowdfunding element has become part of the art. That list of names was always about keeping people alive, and as it turns out it will be doing exactly that, in a small way."

The Winter Of 88 will be launched tonight at a Seafieldroad show at the Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh and will be available digitally early next year. For more details go to www.swimmerone.co.uk