Dwell - The Story Behind The Song
Daffodils
The album starts in a peaceful place with a song called ‘Daffodils’ that I dedicate to my friends Helen and Charlie and their little girl Robyn who was born in the centenary year of jazz.
It seemed like we had been waiting forever for this special little girl to arrive and when she finally did, in late February, the daffodils were starting to bloom and a hopefulness hung in the air: Winter was coming to an end and Spring was almost here.
Robyn’s mother, Helen, begins and ends the track playing sound bowls which gives the song an added innocence and purity.
2. Pollyanna
This track was inspired after a trip to the Heinz Museum in Pittsburgh where they were exhibiting the Apollo 11 Command Module. I find anything to do with space travel incredibly inspiring and after the exhibit I started raving about the moon landing to an American friend expecting them to beam with pride and nostalgia. To my surprise, their immediate reaction was “well, that never happened”. Stunned and a little deflated we proceeded to have a lively (albeit friendly) conspiracy-theory-ish debate and later on I channeled my rage into a new tune I call ‘Pollyanna’.
Drummer Adam Osmianski builds a great solo on this track around the 1m50s mark.
3. Family Tree
‘Walking along the North Bank
I am arrested by an image in my mind’s eye:
A girl walks by her father’s side
Kicking leaves by Cleopatra’s needle.
The footsteps of my former self once walked here
Beside a million other’s tread
Stories, histories.’
The beginning of this song best-introduces its theme; exploring the idea that we’re all connected, individual histories that interweave to create a whole.
4. Castles
On the wall of what once was my local greasy spoon there was a painted mural. The artist had made it look like a hole had been punched through the café wall, exposing the bricks and opening onto a sandy beach surrounded by palm trees and a vibrant sunset sinking into the sea.
This was the inspiration for the song ‘Castles’ which lyrically evolved into quite a dark place, addressing the issue of male suicide. I suppose it could have gone anywhere, not sure why it went there but I think there is so much pressure on men to be ‘men’ at the moment - I wanted to highlight that issue a little in this song.
This song was nearly the title track for the album and to highlight its importance to me, a photo of the mural in the café was used as the basis for the album artwork.
5. Dwell
When I was studying jazz at university I was lucky enough to spend a semester abroad in New Orleans. Unfortunately, the trip was curtailed by the arrival of Hurricane Katrina. An American family were incredibly kind to me and five other foreign exchange students, helping us evacuate with them to their relatives in Texas. Horrified, we watched the devastating fallout on TV and saw pictures of their home on Google Earth flooded up to the eaves. They were safe in Texas but all their possessions had been destroyed. One of the most upsetting items to be lost were diaries where the lady had written a note for every day of her children’s lives as they were growing up. Those journals were completely irreplaceable and reemphasised to me how finite life is.
Joni Mitchell writes in, ‘Both Sides Now’; ‘Something’s lost and something’s gained in living every day’.
That line has always meant a lot to me and given me hope when things looked bleak - I used this idea for the chorus of the title track to the album ‘Dwell’.
The verse of the song has an odd meter and doesn’t follow a conventional phrasing pattern. To compensate for this, at certain points the last word of a phrase becomes the first word in the next phrase.
6. One Minute In Manchester
In terms of the album’s story arc, I feel all the previous songs are leading up to this point and then die away following it. The song was written in response to the tragic events that occurred at the Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena in 2016.
At the time, I was on an artistic residency in Manchester working with 13 other artists under the leadership of amazing singer-songwriter ESKA. A minute silence was being held in the town centre and we all felt we should attend and stand in solidarity with the community of Manchester. It was very moving to be part of that collective experience. Things that stood out to me were the number of children’s teddy bears nestled amongst the floral tributes and during the silence it was the inescapable noise of camera clicks from the world’s press. Afterwards someone began singing the chorus of ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ by the Mancunian band Oasis and the whole crowd joined in singing together. At any other point this could have been cheesy or inappropriate but in that minute it brought people together. The human voice is so powerful and strong as a force to connect other human beings and I attempted to echo this in the chorus of this song.
The track begins with a repeated D pedal on the piano, imitating the ticking of a clock. The key is D minor often viewed as the saddest key signature. I wanted the bass to have a lot of punch on the low end but I also wanted to have the haunting sound and effects that could only be produced using the bowed double bass. In the end, both bassists played on this track.
In the chorus section, the piano went through a low pass filter and then buckets of delay and the guitar solo was filtered through a Roland Space Echo adding to its etherealness. Compositionally, this track was a bit of a departure from some of my other work but I think the musical direction suited the song and story I was trying to express.
7. Boy
Part of my work as a musician has also been as a teacher of music. A couple of years ago I was teaching at a school in Hackney, East London. This song was inspired by one of my students who, whenever I saw him around the school was generally creating mischief and havoc.
When he came into his one-to-one piano lessons, however, he showed a great deal of ability, a strong sense of groove and a fantastic ear. Alongside the usual requests to play Michael Jackson and John Legend he also asked to play the music of Bach and Beethoven and he played it all really well. I think music brought him a measure of peace in the midst of many external frustrations. I love the way that music does this no matter who you are.
8. Mick Coady Says Hello
I wanted to write another instrumental track for the record and this is what came out. Anyone who knows London jazz bassist Mick Coady well, will probably understand the title. Guitarist Rob Luft plays a burning, psychedelic solo at the end of the tune which makes me happy.
9. Ice On The River
When DJ Ritu played this track on her radio show ‘A World In London’ she described it as ‘a symphony of sound' which I thought was quite a compliment. Coming in at 7 minutes long it is definitely one of the longer tunes on the record.
The pentatonic melody for ‘Ice On The River’ was inspired by a Winter run around my local park in London seeing the pond completely iced over. I just heard it straight away and went home and started writing. What came out was an amalgamation of many places I’ve been; sailing through snow in the Baltic in December, the wild and lonesome character of Whittier, Alaska, being caught in a blizzard in West Virginia, and then misty, sleepy Suffolk where I grew up, specifically cold, icy days at Pin Mill on the River Orwell.
10. Let Sleeping Dogs Lie
The closer to the album. I wanted this tune to be relaxing and acoustic giving a little more kudos to the piano (my favourite instrument obvs).
Bassist Henrik Jensen plays the melody on this tune giving it a rootsy, earthy quality. We also recorded a trio tune on my debut album which was a little more intimate than the rest and I thought this would be a nice way to finish things off.