Revenge / Forgiveness

Earlier this year Mark Linkous (of one of my all-time favourite bands Sparklehorse) and Dangermouse (not the one who’s the greatest secret agent in the world) teamed up to make the album Dark Night of the Soul, which also featured guest vocalists Wayne Coyne (The Flaming Lips), Nina Persson (The Cardigans, A Camp) & Suzanne Vega among others.

It’s a great album which, due to an ongoing legal disute between Dangermouse and EMI, has unfortunately still not been officially released. If you look hard enough online though you’ll find it

The lyrics of the first song on the album ‘Revenge’ are incredible. I don’t know if they were written by Mark Linkous, Dangermouse or Wayne Coyne (who sings it) but they beautifully articulate how revenge and un-forgiveness can eat away at us if left unchecked:

Revenge

Pain
I guess it’s a matter of sensation
But somehow
You have ways of avoiding it all

In my mind
I have shot you and stabbed you through your heart
I just didn’t understand
The ricochet is the second part

Cause you can’t hide
What you intend
It glows in the dark
Once you’ve sought
The path of revenge
There’s no way to stop
And the more I try to hurt you
The more that it hurts me

Strange
It seems like a character mutation
Though I have all the means
of bringing you fuckers down
I can’t make myself
To destroy upon command
Somehow forgiveness
lets the evil make a loss

No you can’t hide
What you intend
It glows in the dark
Once we become
The thing we dread
There’s no way to stop
And the more I try to hurt you
The more it backfires
The more it backfires
The more that it backfires

Favourites … 2008

My favourite new albums of this year were….

and

Some close contenders, some older albums I listened to a lot, and some pleasant rediscoveries were:

You can hear some of  my favourite songs this year by clicking here, then pressing play on the player that will appear on the right hand side of the Last.fm page.

What were your favourites?

Jesus is for Losers track 8: Jesus Hands’

Calamateur – Jesus_Hands.mp3

Many years ago I remember hanging out with Craig B – he was a student, while I was just pretending to be one, and we would go to gigs, listen to records and play each other our songs (actually, now I think of it, I only remember playing him one of my songs – what a shy boy I was then).

Craig introduced me to a wealth of new music, much of which has hugely shaped my own musical direction. The most important band he introduced me to at that time was American Music Club, and the solo work of the band’s singer Mark Eitzel. Mercury, San Francisco and Songs of Love Live are still 3 of my favourite ever albums, and the impact they had on me, both musically and personally, was immeasurable.

The song ‘Jesus Hands’, which I’ve done a cover of for my new album,  is from one of American Music Club’s earlier album’s, Everclear, and has some of the saddest lyrics I’ve ever heard.

Jesus is for Losers track 7: Jesus

Calamateur – Jesus.mp3

I’ve uploaded the next two tracks from my new album here:

www.jesusisforlosers.co.uk

The first is a cover of ‘Jesus’ by The Velvet Underground.

When I first started making music with my friend Mark Russell back in 1997, going on to become the band Oldsolar, we listened eagerly to each other’s music collections and borrowed loads of each other’s CD’s.

One of the albums I remember borrowing, and loving, was this The Velvet Underground album. The song Jesus is a wonderfully gentle and simple song – my new take on it is hopefully different enough to warrant existence.

Lawson/Dodds/Woods

This is the new album by Lawson/Dodds/Wood featuring my friend Steve Lawson. It’s great, and has been part of the calm(ish) sountrack to my currently mental life. You can buy it here.

We also made an album together recently which you can buy here.

Calamateur live on Rapal

Now that BBC Alba have broadcast the Rapal show which I recorded a live set for, they have made the 4 songs I played available to view online, as well as the full interview we did. The links are here:

Perfect Moment

Lonely Boy

Sad & Lonely World

Jesus is for Losers

Full interview

When I figure out how to upload the videos to Youtube I’ll let you know…..

Calamateur on TV

If you’ve got SKY or FREESAT then you can tune into BBC Alba on Wednesday night to see me playing a recorded live set. The channels are:

SKY 168

FREESAT 110

The show is called RAPAL and will be on at 10:30pm.

It’ll then be repeated this Friday 17th October at 11pm.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/alba/radio/rapal/english.shtml

Jesus is for Losers track 6: White Light Unknown

Calamateur – White_Light_Unknown.mp3

I wrote this song years ago, possibly as far back as…hmmm….1998. 10 years – wow, I didn’t realise it was that long ago until I figured it out just there.

The song began it’s life with a completely different chorus which hopefully only 1 or 2 other people will remember. Then, in the summer of 1999, my friend Mark (who I was in the band Oldsolar with) went away for 3 weeks and let me stay in his flat and use his studio equipment. I recorded 6 songs, including White Light Unknown, and then in early 2000 I released my first and only 7″ single, with White Light Unknown as the A-side and Inhabit as the B-side.

White Light Unknown was played by John Peel, Radio 1’s Scottish Evening Session & Beat 106 and got some great reviews. I was thrilled and surprised by the positive reception the single received and I think White Light Unknown is still many people’s favourite Calamateur song (which is both cool and little bit depressing!). Hopefully most folk will think this new version is an improvement on the original.

As for the B-side Inhabit, it recently had fresh life breathed into it when the song’s lyrics were chosen by DUFI to be one of 30 stencillised quotes to be sandblasted into the city streets as part of the current re-development of Inverness city-centre:

Jesus is for Losers track 5: Perfect Moment

Calamateur – Perfect_Moment.mp3

One day in 2005, I decided to try and write and record as much music as I could in about 10 hours. I managed 4 songs in all and Perfect Moment was one of them. It’s a song about disappointment, disillusionment, betrayal and murder; all set to one of the poppiest tunes I think I’ve written. I think I’d been reading this book when I wrote it. The same book that also inspired this song.

New music

It was my birthday recently so I decided to spend some of the money I got on new CDs. This is not a regular occurence – most music I get is either made by friends, a free download, or bought from charity shops.

I bought:

I still like buying CD’s, as opposed to downloads, and of the element of risk involved: Will it be any good? As good as their last album? Or will there just be one or two good tracks? And of course there’s the artwork and credits.  Nowadays, I’m almost as interested in where the album was recorded and who produced/engineered/mixed/mastered it as I am in the actual music.

I also love albums. I’ve never been a single buyer (and rarely download single tracks) as I love to hear what someone has to say over the course of a collection of songs rather than just the one. We hear a lot nowadays about people not buying CD’s anymore, and also about the good old days of vinyl, but the format I grew up listening to most was cassette. I think this is one of the reasons I love albums so much; if I was listening to an album on tape it wasn’t quite so easy to skip forward to my favourite track and I learnt to find satisfaction in listening to albums as a whole.

I remember getting a part-time job one summer and having some spare money for the first time. I went to John Menzies in Clarkston and, after much deliberation, bought ‘Hats’ by The Blue Nile and the Batman soundtrack by Prince. I must have listened to those tapes a thousand times over. I invested time in deciding what music to buy, I spent well-earnt money on purchasing it and then spent countless hours getting to know the songs until they became more and more familiar, often becoming the defining soundtrack to what was going on in my life at that time.

Now, instead of this, a mind-staggering amount of recorded music is available in a few keystrokes, if not for free then for a smaller price than I would have paid for my precious tapes half a lifetime ago.

I don’t know what to make of all this most of the time, even after having read countless blogs and articles on the subject. I am, after all, one of the countless recording artists giving away a lot of my music for free and not demanding that someone invest their money in it. Modern recording technology and the internet have made it possible for anyone, including me, to make their music available to the whole world very simply without the help of a record label. And with so many bands and artists now doing this, and with less and less investment involved in us obtaining new music, will we still love music as much as we used to? Or will we just love it in a different way?

Bob Lefsetz has written about this better than I have in this recent post. It’s worth taking the time to read the first 2 and last 2 paragraphs at least.

As for my new CDs, I’ve not been disappointed. Death Cab for Cutie continue to be one of the few bands I get excited about, Iain Archer is (as always) a total genius, and The Notwist combine acoustic and electronic sounds better than I could ever wish to.