Reconnecting with the younger songwriter inside.

I’m listening to my new album, which I’ve just finished, and reconnecting with my ten-year-old self.

Why?

Well, in these weeks after finishing the album - this collection of memories, stab at the future, thoughts, opinions, and I hope some fun - I feel closest to myself as the child songwriter, when I wasn’t writing for ‘albums’, for record companies, to deadliness - before I had an audience at all.

That's if we can reasonably discount the curious horses that would stick their heads over the fence and almost touch the bedroom window of my childhood home – which was the last house at the top of Tobermory, on the Isle of Mull.

Back then they were my audience. I remember the first time I’d recorded a collection of my early songs that I felt good enough to trouble a blank cassette with.

I played them at top volume from my bedroom window to the surrounding fields. And I remember going outside into the fields to listen to it and feeling a sense of pride, but then fear, that this was the first time the world (albeit the world encompassing just a few fields and some bored looking sheep in the Hebrides of Scotland) could hear me, judge me, ignore me.

It’s like being in a void - I'm in that place between finishing my album and waiting for it to reach the public.

I already know the album intimately; I know where it has come from; I can listen to it as I cycle alongside the big river in London; I know the songs and the multitude of melodies that didn't make it to the final running order; I know the parts of me that are exposed and the parts I've handed to a 'character of my choice'. But now it is time for me to let it go. It's time for the musical midwives to deliver it to an audience.

Soon I’ll stop listening to it altogether because it wont be mine anymore. This is my sixth album and therefore the sixth time I have faced this curious void when I have a couple of months of strange blankness in my mind and the melodies give me some peace.

And with these forays away from the ears of curious horses, to the mainland, across the water, can come professional musicianship.

In a recent email that I received from the songwriting association, BASCA (The British Academy of Songwriters and Composers), there was a tagline that read "'Music is the art of thinking with sounds’ – Anon". It made me think once again to being that child, to a more innocent time when I first encountered these ear-worms, these sounds, that wouldn't let me sleep at night above the chorus of horses neighing and sheep sheeping (that was ‘sheeping’…).

And I thought, yes! ‘Thinking with sounds’. That's what a song, a collection of melodies, really is. And so, this void I find myself in now is actually a familiar, warm place.

I suppose we all sometimes like to reconnect with the kids we were and in my case that kid wrote songs, and filled songbooks – and still does. I remember when my now late father brought my first proper guitar home to the island from Edinburgh, carried safely above his head as he waded through the water, having arranged an alternative mode of transport - my uncle's diving boat - after having missed the more conventional route home provided by Calmac ferries.

It was a Fender Telecaster, and it has stayed with me throughout all of my albums.

And so I like the void. I like the feeling I get watching that fantastic BBC 4 Friday night strand of programming featuring classic songwriters of the different eras.

A few weeks ago it was the turn of Carole King and James Taylor, and the other 'Troubadours' who once graced the club of that name in West Hollywood, which spawned a scene so influential.

What amazing songs. I love these kinds of shows, despite not always knowing or loving all the songs. And after the show I had that feeling again and picked up the telecaster - now transported with me to London - and felt the need to create, to fill the void.

I can write about it now, but that night it was simply the love of doing it.

This new album, ‘City Awakenings’, released this time once again under my ‘Mull Historical Society’ moniker, comes out soon and its first live outing will be on Mull in An Tobar on Dec 6th (my old school!) and then London’s Bush Hall on Dec 8th.

It’s then that it starts reaching its audience – and it does so in the best way when the album is simply offered and received as a collection of songs.

Delivered, if you like, held protectively high in the air above water; when the process of making it is the same as the delivering of it, to reach the people who will listen to it.

You can’t force that; it has to come from the music, from letting go, from the feeling behind the chosen songs. It comes from that part of you, the ever-present authentic child - the collective culmination of thinking with sounds.

http://www.colinmacintyre.com