jimkroft

[jimkroft]

Song on mind, mind in songs.....

[jimkroft]

Thermometers

The response to the "One Story, One Song" campaign has been really quite over whelming. I feel very privileged that so many people have shared their stories and experiences. What has really struck me so far is how intimate and brave a lot of these stories are. People have a lot of walls and boundaries, so it feels something special when people let you into what´s really going on. I´m starting to feel that this little EP is going to grow into something unique and personal.

It feels as if a thermometer has been put out into the world, and I am able to gauge its temperature. I am unsure really if the songs are going to express one specific story (per song) or whether they are going to have aspects of all the stories. There is a universality in the stories, when looked at as a whole, and I feel that the songs I am writing seem to want to express this universality, rather than something specific and isolated.

The funny thing with songs, is that though you want to believe you are in control of them, you never are. They just take on their own form and will become what they want to be. I think as soon as you try to control them they leave you. Anyway, I´ll be updating along the way here as writing progresses. Thanks for all the stories so far.

[jimkroft]

The Windmill, Brixton, London 2002.....long hair, small stage, loud guitars, ear splitting feedback, good times!

[jimkroft]

So we´ve just confirmed that Spotify will be releasing 5 new brand new songs which will be written, recorded and released all before the new album "Lunatic Lullabies" comes out in March.

The idea is that fans and people interested in the project write in their stories, and I use this as inspiration for the songwriting.

I´m really excited because I love the idea of kind of accepting the energy of the world and letting it guide you. As a songwriter, sometimes you go through blank or difficult patches. But sometimes you just know that you are filled with songs, and it feels like that at the moment. 

For many many years I wrote "in the dark". That is, I was writing on instinct, faith and out of the need to write. There was never a label, never a plan, never the possibility of people hearing the songs. I watched the record industry crumble around me, left my home country, and kept writing.

So it is incredibly motivating to be going into a writing and recording period knowing that there is a process already in motion. And I have to say that I am quite blown away that Spotify are supporting the release. It´s very rewarding after all these years to feel that people at such a ubiquitous platform have the faith in the songwriting to get on board so early & with such a novel concept.

It´s feels very artistic, and songwriters need business mavericks showing faith, courage and daring. I don´t feel under pressure because I feel that faith and positivity are self-generating, self-perpetuating, self-rewarding. 

Most of all I am enjoying listening to people´s stories. In turn, and through the songwriting process, these stories become my own.

This morning I was up at dawn and the process is already building momentum. Please keep writing those stories. I think that we all have the chance to make something really unique and special with this project.

Then the album is launched and we hit the road!

[jimkroft]

All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher

Ambrose Bierce

[jimkroft]

Tell Me (where to begin)

[jimkroft]

Twist...

Behind, many years all weaved together making a certain pattern. Little dangling disjointed threads that though seemingly making so little sense at the time, somehow conspire together eventually to make a life. Years in the musical underground, suspended between two cities. One in exile from, London. The other a stranger in, Berlin. Chipping away at blocks made of granite. Getting inoculated against the danger of hope. Then deciding to carry on anyway because hell, you just have to do what you have to do. And then somehow, after finally proving as if once and for all to be greatest of idiots, all those threads started making a pattern that indeed did start to cohere. Somehow the path has led from the gritty joyful recklessness of the underground, to a major label. It´s as if there was a back door that no one was watching and somehow the local drunk guy on hefeweisen stumbled in. He wakes up and he´s unsure of his new surroundings - but he´s dam well going to enjoy it. It´s an exciting time, and at the moment things have taken on a stillness, as if I can see myself looking in/out upon a threshold. Suspended. Between underground and whatever comes. It´s all adventure, always was and continues to be. The only thing i feel certain of is that I just want to create. Put stuff out. See it take on a little life, or at least sparkle fleetingly before its forgotten. That´s life, and I am utterly okay with that. That´s its condition, and you don´t have any choice but to play your hand. You love, hurt, heal. Then you have to make a choice. Stick or twist? I´ll twist please.....

[jimkroft]

Even if i were to become convinced that everything is a disorderly, damned devilish chaos, if I were struck even by all the horrors of human disillusionment, still I would want to live.

Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

[jimkroft]

See How the Darkness Grows - acoustic live

[jimkroft]

Devils

One of those indescribable days that if you don´t write about before it ends you will forget. No not forget. Just never fathom its dimensions, its longevity.....the place it played in your life, without ever knowing it, or meaning it to. Modernity. It fragments, it binds, it builds in you, it destroys. Today i went through the complete radar of my experience. I pushed its bounds, and more to the point it pushed me. I am in shards. Rainbow shards. I have put my demons to bed inch by inch through my history. And then somehow, knowingly, I have reinvited them to the table. The table my ancestors left. And wonder still why I have chosen to sit with new company. We are in league with forces beyond our control. Yet there is no excuse. There is just Mogwai through blaring monitor speakers at dawn, and your demented perspectives on your life. Occasionally you hear the voice of what others would have it have been. And you either live with the decision, or you die in the doubt. Today a video shoot. Radiant clowns. Pop culture references. The sense of a story being told that you are somehow in the heart of. Your heart beats at its very core, its very essence. And still sometimes you don´t know its place, or what it means, but still you dam well feel blessed. You are that other that completes its tale. Forgive me. But in that centre I find my heart, my core, my doubt, my unknowingness. There are many types of faith. And somehow in this place, in this time, I find mine. Was it so very wrong to become so very lost? I just don´t know. Out of this lostness comes the tale of my life. Fuck. I tap at dawn with nothing but the knowledge of my friends. For all the times I never reached out, please just forgive me. 7 Amens and I can´t see you.  And then when that destructions sits with me, it is only I who can be with it. But in being with it I find a peace. And it brings me back to you. Like one of those many many songs I have written that no one has heard. Or yet heard. Slowly my little lost fruits are coming to life. Somehow. Somehow Lord, after all this time some people are listening to these little tributes to searching. Do they know how greatful I am? I doubt it. But they given meaning to the meaning i searched for in this life I have led. I am in total adoration. Imagine that buddy. After all this time someone has chosen of there own free will to listen to your music. I just can´t believe it. I will go to my grave - whether tomorrow, tonight, or at the end of my days - with a picture in my my, my life, my soul transformed. It wasn´t for nothing. And people that could never have expected it have given me that gift. I am humbled before you. Those few few few of you. Who gave that gift. Of listening. I´m tapping madly now. It is my indulgence. The place I don´t need to self edit. I am at one with my lost words thrown out into infinity. Finding there meaning in nothing but the potential for just one reflection.  Today on the shoot I walked through a maze of mirrors, an infinity of mirrors. And found once again in my fragmentation a rebirth. I am ready to commit again. Those flailing arms are still in that breeze. Beyond the industry, before the records, before everything in me - there is a human heart. My next album - after Lunatic Lullabies - will be called "Like a Human Heart". It will be testament that through it all I never lost my heart. My fragile beating heart. My reminder of everyone and everything, of every connection I ever made. And now I won´t rest. I will, be-fucking-lieve me, sit with that devilry, that voice, that inescapable thing. And again to the devil - there will be no bargain with this soul. There is much i cannot face. But I do no need your bargain. I again stare it in the eye. And in it - there - my reflection. 

[jimkroft]

Abandoned Fairs

Today we shot the first scenes for the single "Tell Me (Where to Begin)". I´ve been hoping to do something creative in the Spree Park for some years. It wasn´t my suggestion this time round, but the idea has managed to come full circle, and we found ourselves there today in the snow, shivering and working out how to best interact with the space.

The Spree Park was opened in 1969 in the old DDR as a permanent fun fair. It made me think how unendurable permanent things are, and how few fairs there are now a days. I doubt such a vast space will ever be made into an area of recreation again. 

I am not sure where the human attraction to broken things comes from. But there is a grandeur in things redolent with the passing of time. I expected it to be more eerie, even sinister. But with the white canopy of snow, stillness and awkward silent sleeping geometric forms, it felt somehow poetic. You don´t expect something so modern to become so quickly ancient, but somehow it now rests derelict by day and guarded by night, an uncelebrated but fitting epitaph to the old DDR.

Occasional new characters now crunch over the snow trodden paths, mingling with the ghosts of old. They made me think of Jimi Hendrix´s lyrics:

"....will the wind ever remember, the names it has blown in the past? And with it´s old age, its crutch and it´s wisdom, it whispers no, this will be the last...:"

So long Spree Park, and thanks for having us.....

[jimkroft]

Survivors Tales

Tomorrow we´re shooting the video for "Tell Me (where to Begin)". Its a funny song title to shoot at this time. It reminds me that it has been a life time to get to the beginning, a long race to the starting line. Sometimes I wonder what the hell I was expecting when I drove my van onto that ferry at Harwich back in 2007. The music industry was already collapsing, and things are even less pretty now. At least Robert Johnson had the opportunity to make his deal with the devil. The devil got scared off by the modern industry it seems. There are no bargains left. The deal you make nowadays is with nothing except uncertainty....and a joyous dizziness after enough hefeweisen´s and the supreme ridiculousness of things. Sometimes I wonder how many of the great bands would really have survived in this modern industry. The fact is that none of them existed in a time anything like it is nowadays. One of my principle reasons for leaving the UK was that there just wasn´t the damndest chance of making a penny from your own songs on the club scene in London. Berlin was a broke city, but it offered so much more in terms of trying to bring in a buck from playing your own songs - prost Zapata, prost White Trash. And now, here i find myself, suspended in that fractious space between the underground and the major label universe. I do look forward an imaginary time, when you can just sit and enjoy the time, take things in and be. But the reality for now is that where ever you are in music, label or no label, underground or over ground, rock or soul, hipster or hacienda, surviver or new comer; you have to be willing to fight. Tooth and claw. For your chance. Then to take your chance. Then to keep your chance. And that is why, it is called rock n roll. It´s ongoing, it doesn´t end, it doesn´t wait. You have to keep with it, or be left behind by it. You have to accept it´s conditions or be broken by it. You will probably get broken anyway. And if you can´t find the joy in that itself, then maybe you were looking in the wrong place for whatever type of joy you were seeking. Anyway. Ruminations aside, it´s time to make a video, and i´m looking forward to chattering teeth, long johns and working with Captain Rummelsnuff - ahoi!

[jimkroft]

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass"

Anton Chekhov 

[jimkroft]

Articles on Music

Here´s a few music articles which have interested or illuminated me recently. A really good article on the reality of financing a modern professional band:http://www.vulture.com/2012/09/grizzly-bear-shields.html, on the transitions at my new label in Germany: http://www.musicweek.com/news/read/universal-outlines-emi-germany-plans/052805, and the bitter reality of attempting to make a life in music these days (thanks Ed) http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2012/10/theres-no-money-indie-music-cat-power-broke/58552/

[jimkroft]

GINSBERG ON "HOWL"

"....I turned aside in San Francisco, unemployment compensation leisure, to follow my romantic inspiration....I thought I wouldn´t write a poem but just write what I wanted to without fear, let my imagination go, open secrecy, and scribble magic lines from my mind - sum up my life  something I wouldn´t be able to show anybody....write for my own soul´s ear....."

[jimkroft]

I´m working on the seeds of a whole bunch of new song ideas. It´s funny how sometimes the process kind of takes over you. It´s like when you stop looking for something, it comes and finds you. I know it´s back to front to be talking about new songs before the next album "Lunatic Lullabies" comes out. I´m guess I´m writing about album 4 before you´ve heard album 3. But I never asked life to make sense, it generally, it has complied. 

I guess that´s the beauty of songwriting. That it can just grab you, and you have to decide whether you are going to follow the moment or let it pass. At the moment I feel that the year has kind of caught up with me, and after all the touring I can feel that I am quite raw and tired. But the songs are really disruptive. Like a noisy neighbour who refuses to shut up. As a songwriter you know that it can get dry sometimes, so you let the moment pass at your peril.

In any case, I´ve decided to keep whoever is interested up to date with the process itself. Writing is always something I´ve done in private. But for some reason at the moment it feel right to share the process. I asked recently in a post for some ideas and inspiration from people. I really enjoyed the reaction, and I feel that it has kind of helped me kick off this new creative cycle.

I have always thought about releasing song as I write them. So that they are written recorded released. The trouble, and brutal reality, is that I never had so many people to hear them. And I didn´t want to sacrifice them to the black spam hole of cyber space. I felt they deserved more.

But currently, the idea is still living with me again. I guess it will still be awhile yet before I can do such a cycle, but who knows? My experience with the new record company has been so positive till this point, and they have from the start been really supportive about helping me perserve the identity and ethos of the project. So i have a feeling that the future is open, and that there are many possibilities.

Over the next days I will post about the new songs, all centered around an acoustic guitar, and what they are saying - the process. 

[jimkroft]

LUNATIC LULLABIES

I have just been to the Sunst Bros studio to see the artwork for the new album. I am completely blown away with what the guys have come up with. It was just like seeing the visual reality of your album fully formed out of nothing, right there in front of you. Sunst Bros are two of my oldest and best friends in Berlin. I am completely proud to be working on my first major label release with a couple of guys I first met at dawn at a house party in the abandoned building we were all living in back in February 2007. There´s nothing like going forward with your friends. I feel like it is a real blessing to see how the lives of the people around me are evolving. Sometimes during the last years, I was haunted by a little demon mocking me and telling me I was wasting my life. As a musician you spend a lot of your life alone, and that demon was too often an uninvited companion. But I´m glad that he always challenged me. The only way he´d shut up was in attempting to fill the nothingness with actions. Those actions were always imperceptible, and usually incremental. But fill the space with gradual positivity and faith, and what ever you do, and who ever you are, the years dam well lead you somewhere. Tonight I´m toasting the Sunst Bros for being my companions on this journey. And I´m excited for you all to hear this album early next year. It´s called “Lunatic Lullabies”.