In the Spring and Summer of 2018 I showed up to Audioculture Studios with a bag containing my notebooks crammed full of songs and musings , a set of harmonicas and an acoustic guitar. Blossoms had just started showing on some of the trees, both my grandparents were in the grave and my parents were busy navigating a devastating divorce after forty years of marriage. The first cracks were starting to show in my own and I had decided that the evenings would be better spent being creative and making something beautiful and lasting.
My friend, producer and engineer, Jaco Naude had an intimate little setup ready with an old microphone and a chair. Surrounded by old reel to reel tape recorders and amplifiers I started paging through my songs, some of them written in 2006, and we started doing take after take with me telling stories behind some of them to Jaco. We worked fast and many of the recordings were first takes. I had a lot going on and it felt like I needed to capture these songs in order to make available more bandwidth for the next set of challenges that I was facing. I did not record these demos with the intention of releasing them as a collection of songs but rather another way of preserving them and having reference material when recording with a band. They were raw, imperfect and in some cases needed a bit more work but I was happy to get it done and safe in my Dropbox.
A few weeks ago I poured a whiskey and with the lights off, I listened to all these recordings, now almost five years old. I thought of that time and the years since then. All the changes… I thought of who I was when some of those songs were written and the people and places they were about. I thought of my friends and ex-lovers in Wisconsin. I thought about my parents and my own little family I had to let go. I reflected on the last year and my mind wandered to the farm, my friends and the ones who are no longer with us. I wondered, briefly about the future and I was filled with gratitude for health and blessings, too many to mention. I decided to take the final step in moving on from the person I used to be and put these songs out into the world , as they are, no embellishments or overdubs. Just me and my guitar. I paged through some old photo albums and found the picture I used on the cover. I took that picture in the street in front of my friend Jon Cody’s home in Wausau Wisconsin just before I came back I after my last farming contract. My head was pounding from a bourbon induced headache and Rufus sat smoking on the icy porch, lost in his own thoughts. It was the end of era, the end of childhood for me and in a way it seems fitting that I can apply it to yet another symbolic ending.
I am still searching for stories and working hard at telling them the best way I can. Truthful and with empathy. I’m still restless and romantic, but maybe a little wiser. I still struggle with loss and the knowledge that this will all eventually come to nothing. I still have notebooks and I’m still filling them with thoughts , poems and songs. I’m slowly walking away from the boy in the snow but often run into the boy on the South African farm, the young man in the city and the middle-aged farmer. There are a lot of stories and songs to be found in these people and the places they inhabit.
So, if you feel like it, go on the journey with me. Take the songs for what they are and if possible, make them your own. Maybe there is something in there for you. Then come and find me as I’m telling the next chapter of our story in this terrible beauty called life.
JB