The shadows are coming
New music arrives this Friday 5th June
Dear friends,
It’s been a while since I wrote one of these but the time has not been idle. On Friday I’m releasing new music for the first time in what I believe the technical term is - ‘yonks’1.
Shadows is the first single off my upcoming album Gone to the Dogs. It’s a crescendo of voices and layered loops laced with violin and synth, building to a choral end that is designedly unsettling and compelling.
I’ll be honest with you, I have no idea how it’s going to land - but I’m so excited to share it at last.
photo credit Emma Ledwith - cover design by TSarzi
Those of you who have followed this newsletter from its early days will know that Gone to the Dogs began as a one-woman stage show back in 20232
That was a mad chaotic experience (as much to watch as to perform I think) - obviously satirical but also deeply sad, in which I played a kind of latter-day Britannia, left behind and isolated from the outside world, piecing together the fragments of memory and identity through music and song, kept in line by the periodic interjections of an increasingly belligerent radio (also voiced by me…3).
What I loved about that show was that I could marry sadness and ridiculousness together to create something that was beautiful and true & very sincere - but not at all to be taken seriously. There was no way you could look at the desecration of the stage at the end of the hour (or me - one sock on one sock off, heels kicked aside, standing in just a slip with my hair all over the place) and think - god, she really believes in this We Used To Be Great malarkey.
The mess was the point - the chaos was a frame for how myth and national identity, if reduced to rote, become nonsensical.
It was not a straightforward show, asserting a single uncomplicated message. My favourite part of the reactions - both audience and press - is that people found very different things to love or hate about it4.
Creating it as a studio album is a different kettle of fish and chips of course. There is the urge to over-explain, to pre-empt misinterpretation - to provide a key for the lyric cypher of something that has previously rested on the context of a visual theatre performance. Knowing the music is about to go out into the world alone makes me wary, as well as excited.
I am half sick of shadows - begins the opening refrain, a fragment from a Tennyson poem that has stayed with me since school. It paves the way for a looped hypnotic rumination on past identity and an isolated shadow existence - one that cannot step into the world outside, one that is - or feels itself - bereft.
This country used to be good - laments the shadow chorus, becoming a vast sound wall of righteous indignation by the end:
This country used to be everything your grandfather went to war for
It is an evocation of how big disturbing ideas can grow from small half-remembered nuggets and coalesce into something much darker - how nuance can be stripped and meaning inferred; how the obsessive loops of our thoughts and memories cut grooves into our shared identities and become the rallying cry we join together in.
In short, it is not meant to be taken literally.
But I wonder - and perhaps I worry - how will a song like Shadows fare outside of the visual context of its theatre roots? When it is itself reduced to a fragment?
I wonder if it will get played on the radio, or added to playlists. It is a hard sell for sure. I have no doubt that I’ve made something beautiful in this album - but I wonder what its future will be in this audio world of algorithms and curated playlists, a penchant for uncomplicated optimism and a tendency to take things at face value.
I guess we’ll see?
You can pre-save Shadows now, wherever you stream your music5
And if this does tank, at least I know I’ve got 2 more singles to rest my laurels on. The next one is called the Hungry Hungry Cenotaph and it’s about - you guessed it - a cenotaph who just cannot get full.
I’m sure it’ll all be fine.
going off of a brain sidequest here - but is there such a thing as one ‘yonk’ (sg)? How long does it last?
Technically it began as a scratch show the year before, and arguably its origins are even earlier, beginning as a long slow descent into madness - in musical form - circa Lockdown - but in lieu of being able to pin an exact date on when The Whole Bloody Thing Started, I like to keep it neat and stick to the imprecise but narratively pleasing lore of: ‘this began as a stage show that I took to the Fringe in 2023’
I definitely went mad
The Scotsman in their 4* feature review went as far as to repeat the sentiment for extra clarity: ‘It won’t be for everybody,’ they wrote - then, for good measure at the end: ‘Just to be clear, this show won’t be for everybody’. I also got a few walk outs of which I was very proud. Then others would come up afterwards and tell me it was the most beautiful thing they’d seen. A particularly laudatory audience review from first previews said, rather boldly: ‘This show is the reason we come to the Fringe - the future of theatre is in safe hands with performers like this’.
Pre-saves feel weird but they help show an interest in your music before release day, which helps any upcoming releases build traction and look good for press and playlists. It makes me look popular basically. Personally I haven’t been popular ever in my life, but you can help me pretend.