Second Album Blues?

The standard narrative is bands and musicians struggle with their second albums.

It goes like this:

The average band / musician takes a lifetime to get their first album ready - it reflects years of learning, playing, writing, refining, progressing and work.

The album comes out - to great or lesser fanfare - they tour - perhaps - … and then they have six weeks to write and record the next one.

Time is tight. Studios are booked. Production, press and distribution deadlines are locked in with touring schedules …

… which is why second albums are traditionally a hodge-podge of songs that weren’t judged good enough for the first album, half-baked ideas sung into a voice note at three am one night on the road, something the bass player came up with that the band was too tired to fight against and something terrible the lead singer wrote for the girlfriend who is currently telling him that he’s the talented one who should go solo.

Which is an introduction of sorts to saying that I’ve been thinking about what, if anything, to do now Northumbria is out.

I say ‘of sorts’, because thinking is the wrong word.

What I’ve actually been doing is listening to what is coming out and trying to understand where it wants me to travel.

If I was following the story arc above, I’d take the ideas I have left from writing and producing Northumbria and work them up.

Managers and Record Companies would support this move, for the following reasons:

1) It’s mining the established theme, which is encouraged now, because bands aren’t encouraged to find new sounds in the same way they were.

In the first half of the pop revolution, being hip meant being current, which meant evolving, which meant finding a ‘new’ sound. Dylan going electric, the Beatles going psychedelic are driven by the same ideological beliefs as the same as The Specials moving from Ska to Fun Boy Three and synths; or U2 going from the big sky music of The Joshua Tree to the post-industrial Berlin claustrophobia of Night Town and Achtung Baby.

Find the new. Set the trend, don’t follow it.

Then, in the 1990’s, pop became finding something that pop had already done before and doing it again, ironically or not. Oasis going lagered-up Beatles if played by Slade (unironically) and Blur going Small Faces / The Who mod (with self-awareness, so ironically) for Britpop; Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson going pre-murder Ronettes-era Phil Spector for Back to Black.

Nothing wrong with that. Pastiche, after all, is one of the oldest and most venerable of art forms. It means to sing alongside. And if it’s new for you, it doesn’t matter if it’s been done before.

2) Because all business, including the music business, is about margins. Why risk changing something that you know already works for something that might not? Do what worked the first time, repeat the formula.

I’m painting in broad strokes with obvious examples here, but you get the gist.

It would make a certain amount of sense to do that now.

I have ideas that came up during the writing and recording of Northumbria that weren’t used. I could start with this. The music would then be thematically similar, as it came from the same place, and would appear a logical progression or continuation, exploring the musical territory that Northumbria established.

But when I sit down to play, that isn’t what’s coming out.

What’s coming out is being shaped by circumstances and context: the world around me and my engagement with it.

And this is making it different because the world is now very different.

Yours, mine, everyone’s.

We’re apart.

We’re separated from our loved ones.

We aren’t allowed to hold them, love them, tell them it’s all going to be okay.

And that’s informing what’s coming out.

Here’s how, and why:

First, music has always been communal and collaborative for me.

So, when I couldn’t play in Sheffield, it hurt because not only could I not find connection to myself through my instrument, I couldn’t pursue and reinforce the connection to others that making music brought either.

I didn't just lose the part of myself that loved and enjoyed playing.

I lost one of the ways I connected to others, my connections with them and our sharing of communal and collaborative spaces and moments.

Right now, in lockdown, none of those things are available.

I’m finding that I’m thinking about people I haven’t seen because of it and who I miss and who I know miss me; and the places that were special to us or that hold special memories … and music is coming out.

Music’s ability to help connect, coalesce, process and resolve is one of the fundamental reasons why I play.

But there’s a further strand to it as well.

When I was five or six years old, I came home from school on a sunny afternoon.

My father, as Northumbria narrates, was a deep-sea diver and worked away.

So, when I saw his car parked outside, I knew he was back.

I found him sitting in the front room with a few of his diving friends.

He and another called Sonny Chamberlain had their acoustic guitars out.

As I walked in, they were playing and strumming through the plaintive opening sequence of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here - my Dad playing the main chords, Sonny joining in with a note-perfect take on David Gilmour's part.

Then they began singing, harmonising ...

So ...

So you think you can tell ...

I watched and listened to them working through the song.

I didn’t know the song then.

I didn’t know who had written it, who Pink Floyd were or what their arc was.

And I didn’t know that my Dad and Sonny Chamberlain were playing it as a friend of theirs had just been killed on the same job they’d been on, just like I didn’t know then that North Sea Oil in their time was a killing dangerous business.

Wish you were here …

I just remember watching them, hearing the music that they were making …

I probably didn’t consciously register that’s how you’re supposed to make music but that moment along with countless others in my formative years where that scene was replayed, reenacted and revisited imprinted the idea that music is something that people make together.

It’s communal.

It’s collective.

It’s shared.

It’s coming together.

It’s joining in.

That's what music has been throughout my life - from swapping licks with Andy H, to making a collective racket together in my first bands, to my first paid gigs and sessions, to sit-ins and writing sessions.

Even in family get-togethers where before the advent of smart 'phones, there'd be a piano, a guitar, a violin or flute and someone who couldn’t count coming in early as we tried to work out Beatles tunes on the hoof from an inaccurate songbook.

Join in.

Sing along.

The sort of moment is currently denied to all of us, unless we do it over video link.

And what drove that connection, fundamentally, was songs.

Standard tuned guitars, cowboy chords, songs.

A lot of musicians, especially guitarists, forget the importance of the song.

Being able to sweep-pick Paganini's 5th Caprice is, on one level, impressive as a display of physical athleticism.

But Paganini’s 5th Caprice is also, fundamentally, a song.

Unless that’s remembered, music becomes all about the musician.

When someone plays something and you can all sing along, though …

That's a totally different thing.

The former is using music to show how wonderful you are.

The latter is using music to bring everyone together in a shared moment and make them feel wonderful.

Don’t you remember the jokes?

How many lead guitarists does it take to change a lightbulb?

Twenty-nine.

One to change it, and twenty-eight to say they could have done it better.

I love guitarists.

I am one.

But there’s a world of truth in that joke. Why would you want to make music that only other guitarists might like when you could write a song everyone could sing instead?

Musical techniques are important, of course.

But they are a means to an end, rather than the end itself.

Technique, mechanical ability / skills, exists to facilitate the making of music.

The making of music does not equate to or exist to facilitate the showing off of mechanical ability.

Songs are what matter.

Northumbria had songs, of course.

But I’m thinking of the sort of songs that anyone who knows three chords could play.

Because that’s the second sort of music that’s currently coming out.

Cowboy chords. Changes. Lyrics. Songs.

Yeah. I know. Music with words. Songs, then.

Songs about loss and distance and separation - all the things we’re all currently experiencing.

Songs anyone who knows three chords could play - which after the harmonic complexity of Northumbria is intriguing in and of itself, but the odd thing is that their simplicity offers more choice.

As well as these songs, a second strand of musical interest is emerging.

Every day, I go out into the garden and I think about the people I can’t see, and the places I can’t go, and the things I can’t do … and as I do melodic lines start to emerge and develop on the guitar.

And I’d like to see where they go.

So, two distinct but interrelated strands of music are coming through.

One: Songs.

Two: Melodic lines and pieces.

Both are valid musics.

My first impulse, as each piece comes out or each song arrives unbidden, is to record them as soon as they do.

For all it was recorded on an analogue four-track machine (and perhaps because it was recorded on an analogue four-track machine) Northumbria was a production-intensive project. My first idea was to capture these new ideas very simply - one microphone, one guitar, one vocal (if a vocal is needed), one pass.

The thinking was to capture singular performances rather than build singular performances. I'd swing the guitar forward towards the mic if I wanted it higher in the mix, and pull back if I wanted it lower.

But I’ve pulled back from that for good reasons.

Things need time and space to develop.

Northumbria told me what it needed to be.

If I give them time, these distinct but related musics will too.

©℗ A. I. Jackson

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The first Origin(al) Stories Journal was a blog launched to track the nine months that went into the writing and recording of the Northumbria album. You can read about the thought processes behind that here.

Following the launch of The Landing Stage website, I’ve decided to continue with the Origin(al) Stories posts.

The Landing Stage showcases some of the things I do.

The Origin(al) Stories posts show some of the thoughts and processes and activities that go into those acts of doing.

Drawn from my personal diaries and journals, the posts might often seem unconnected, elliptical and fragmentary.

This is because the Origin(al) Stories blog doesn’t offer the definitive conclusions, hacks, lists or ‘how to …’ advice beloved of Youtube gurus, bro-science and self-help manuals.

This is because there’s no one road through the forest, no one route to the top of the mountain, no one path to where you want to be and what you want to do.

The Origin(al) stories only shows how I’ve found a path through to doing something.

The path always has to give you as much as the destination.

They are, as I noted in the original post about it, postcards from the journey. Snapshots of work in progress - which is what all lives and endeavours are.

If you’ve liked an Origin(al) Stories post, or it’s helped you with something you’re doing in some way, please share it to your socials, and give credit. All content on this website is under copyright and attributable.

If you’d like to listen to Northumbria, download it here.

If you’d like to listen to Alnwyck Jameson Badger, download it here.

If you’d like to listen to Broken Oars Podcast, download it here.

Thanks for reading. Have a great day. Tell the people you love that you love them. Be a positive force.