Happy Xmas: Jenkem & Good Quack, American Sole & New Recordings
on 16th December 2008
Dear All,
Have a Happy Xmas! It's been great to play to you and get your messages out and about throughout the year.
A very creative year for me.
If you're looking for a credit crunch drug of choice – check out the new single 'You're A Star' video…i learnt a new thing while making it: consult Google for 'Jenkem'…..it's getting close to Xmas if you need to get your supplies in!
All details of the new single are on the site. But for me, one of the good things during The Water single releases is putting out the tracks that i've been storing on my computer which i recorded for my first 3 albums but never used. This time it's a song called 'Dry Me Out' , which will be available with 'Star', which
i recorded for 'Loss' but never included. I had so many songs left over i felt like setting up a stall. I think i sung it on a raw throat day but i like it's simplicity and that now it's having its day. 'When Losers Become Friends', which is now available for download on iTunes etc, and was released with the Famous For Being Famous single, is actually one of my fav tracks that i've recorded (originally for 'Us', but i didn't think it fitted back then).
I'm in America, soon going to pop down to Granpa's Music store for my borrowed guitar – i do it every year. Earlier this year i did the same and the songs i wrote on it I'm now listening to on my iPod and you will soon be able to too. They were recorded during this year on the other side of the roaring Atlantic in my old classroom on Mull
and will be my next album. More to come on that. But each night that I drove away from the makeshift studio that used to have a blackboard I saw two geese, each night at various stages of escape – they were comical flapping in my headlights, making me wait. I've attached a terrible picture of them I took on my phone at 1am one night; doesn't flatter them at all. Sometimes they'd be down the lane and sometimes right outside their house, never reaching the water, but, like most politicians and cat's eyes, always in the middle of the road.
It's good to be listening to these new songs recorded in such a significant place for me. And to be on Obama's soil, or what is soon to be. And also good to see on the news that a man threw his shoes at Pres Bush. I hope he had smelly feet.
This year there's talk of Christmas carol singing so I'm off to learn the chords.
Current reading:
'Home' by Marilyn Robinson
'A Snowball In Summer' by Lorn Macintyre
'A Freewheelin' Time' by Suze Rotolo
Current listening:
'The Hawk is Howling' by Mogwai
Something copied below that i wrote while travelling back home to record a few months ago.
Colin
Going Home
What is it, the place i expect it to be?
What has it been while i have become?
A bird's broken wing,
a flat land overtaken by flood?
What is it, this thing i have become?
I don't know me
I don't know when
But i know it.
And alas,
When i see it it is as it always was:
Hills taking flight.
C.Colin MacIntyre, 2008.
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