Category: Updates

Back to bread

I learned how to bake soda bread from my mother when I was still in school, but never really got into making bread until I was in university and had a kitchen I could use myself. One of my friends in my final year of university was a baker, and taught me how to make a yeast dough. It was our form of socialising – we’d bake bread, drink tea, and listen to great music. We have a wonderful little rivalry over who makes the best bread, eventually agreeing that we would settle on the fact that she makes better yeast breads and I make better soda breads.

The last few years I’ve not made much bread at all, after hitting a peak in my breadmaking when I lived in the UK, but I’ve been getting back into it lately in a big way. I think I’ve made a loaf every two or three days for the past few weeks. It started out with my quest to get better at pizza doughs, as I’m a big fan of making pizza from scratch. Every week I had a Pizza & Dr Who evening, which is pretty self explanatory I think.

But, finding good strong white flour has been the lifesaver of my breadmaking, and the recent loaves have been really delicious. My mother even commented on my most recent loaf saying that it was as good as one bought in a shop.

I think I enjoy it in the same way I enjoy swimming. You have to set aside some part of your day to do it, and there’s a mindlessness to the repetitive physical action that you stop consciously thinking about – your mind is free to wander elsewhere and not have to give it its full attention. Kneading a dough is also a wonderful way to work out frustrations ;) There’s also the fact that you get a really tasty loaf out of it and the house fills with the smell of baking bread. Delicious stuff.

I usually use it to break up piano practice – I go and play for an hour or so while the dough is rising, or use that time to make myself a meal. Now that I’m happy with my basic brown and white breads (I’ve made a successful wholemeal loaf most recently) I’m trying to decide what to try and add next to my arsenal of bread making.

Jazz Festival, more mixing, and a Swede

I’ll be playing a set in the Festival Club at the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival this October 30th. The time isn’t confirmed as yet, but I’ll update some more about that when I know later on. I don’t believe I’ve ever actually played a gig in Cork before, now that I think about it. I’m looking forward to showcasing some of the tracks from the record along with some of the other songs that didn’t make it on to this record, but are being held over for a later date.

I’ve also been writing again recently, reworking older unfinished songs, polishing off mostly finished song, and writing some brand new ones too. I’m really happy with some of the newer material and a little part of me wishes I could just jump right back into the studio and knock out a second record this winter, as I have enough songs that I’m happy with to go and do that. But I still have work to do to finish off this one first. And who knows what other songs I’ll write in the meantime.

I was back in the studio for a day a week or two ago to do some tweaks to the album mixes, but I think I now have mixes that I’m happy with of the record. Some little things niggling at me about the track sequencing at the moment, but I took a break from listening to the record to go back at it with fresh ears and sort out the part of the sequencing that I’m not happy with. The next stage will be to get the record mastered.

I’ve been spending a lot of time playing piano again – the digital piano is set up in my room, and I’ve been able to play away on headphones. However, I’ve been snatching time at the acoustic piano too – though it is in dire need of tuning and some minor repairs. Hopefully that’ll all be sorted out next week when the piano tuner comes to call!

One of my best friends is visiting from Sweden for a few days next week too. Last time she was here I had just bought my first little protools recording setup, and we had a ball recording some covers and little things on that same piano that I’m getting tuned next week. Nika plays in two wonderful Swedish traditional folk groups, Sheik and JONI, and as well as having her own solo output, and studied classical piano with me in Maynooth a number of years ago. If you’ve never listened to any Swedish traditional folk, any of those three links wouldn’t be a bad introduction, in my opinion. One of the songs I learned from her, Vargsången, I ended up arranging for SATB choir and performing with the NUIG Choralsoc last year, and is one of my favourites of my own arrangements.

Here’s Annika singing a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Conversation” on my piano a long time ago now. It’s quite quiet, but I had just one microphone that was on loan from a friend, and the actual recording session itself is lost, and we just have mp3 copies of those tracks left. But she did a really lovely version of this song:

annika hammer – conversation by misterebby

I’m a sucker for songs with choirs.

Seriously, it’s like crack to me. I think I can probably blame my parents for this one quite successfully: my dad has always sung in the local church choir, and my mother introduced us all to the wonderful songwriter Melanie, and this song in particular:

It can seem cliché to throw in a choir for some extra emotion, but there’s something really rousing about a group of different voices coming together as one. The combination of all those different vocal timbres creates something very special indeed. Even if they’re just singing in unison, there’s so much power in a group of voices.

I’ve been in choirs since I was really young, and have a major soft spot for choral music as a result. Last year I was conducting a choir for the first time properly – previously I’d set up a mini choir for an amateur production of Sister Act that I arranged all the music for. That’s a long story for another time. But, it was my first experience of properly arranging music for a group of other people to sing, and I was completely hooked. I think I arranged about half of the material I got the NUIG choir to sing last year – stuff that varied from Elvis songs to Swedish folksongs.

Speaking of Swedish music, one of my favourite guilty pleasure songs with choirs is by the Swedish band The Ark, who some people probably remember mostly for their Eurovision entry in 2007. However, I remember them mostly for a Swedish friend of mine who was rather obsessed with them and introduced me to their music. This particular song is one that has stayed with me since, mostly for the choir entry in it. The song itself is pretty straight forward and quite emo lyrically, but the interplay between the choir and the lead singer in the last section of the song is absolutely stellar.

And I must take a moment to thank @donalmulligan, who reminded me of this great track that I first heard on the Pet Shop Boys “Back To Mine” compilation. Incidentally, you may also have heard it recently on the Channel 4 show “Sirens”, which I recommend watching btw. I lost that PSB compilation in the Great Hard Drive Crash of 2011, but I’m glad that youtube is there so I can still find these tracks to listen to. Try not to dance in your seat as you listen to it.

I had a playlist on my old iTunes that was dedicated to “Choral Awesomeness”, as I put it, but alas it’s something I’ll have to rebuild from scratch again now. Not all the selections had such bombastic choirs – some were more serene, like Kate Bush’s “Hello Earth” which quotes the Georgian folk song “Tsintsharo”, featured in the Werner Herzog film “Nosferatu”. Or Thea Gilmore’s amazing “Sol Invictus”, which quickly became one of my favourite midwinter songs ever. I’ve also previously posted about one of my favourite choirs, Scala, who do gorgeous choral versions of popular music.

But it seems pretty obvious that the love of choral music, and the years spent either singing in or conducting choirs, would have some effect on the kind of music that I write. That certainly does seem to be the case, listening back to the mixes. I realised that I have 10-part harmony at one point in one of the songs, and there’s a definite choral feel to that particular song. However, it’s definitely a different thing to be layering up different vocal lines with your own voice, and working with a choir. Maybe I’ll put together a little choral group to sing live with me so I can really get those vocal textures live that are on the record.

Inspiration: Joni Mitchell

This is one of my favourite Joni Mitchell songs, and I stumbled across this live version from 1970 on youtube today while searching out more performances from this BBC In Concert series.

The entire concert is collected here, if you fancy losing yourself to some wonderful live solo performances from a talented songwriter on the cusp of the greatest period of her career. This would have been in the period just after Ladies Of The Canyon, while writing songs that would appear on Blue.

There’s a great early version of “All I Want” in that show too, while it was still being written, which I recommend checking out, if only to compare it to the version that is so well known and loved on the album. In fact, that song was the reason for a spur of the moment road trip across the country one year for me. My ex was visiting, and we went for a hangover breakfast with a friend, and afterwards, this song came on in my CD player in the car, and we decided that my ex wouldn’t get a bus back to Cork, but that we’d all just keep on driving and listening to my Joni CDs and sing along. Now, every time I hear that riff starting on the dulcimer, I think of the road to Cork, and it makes me smile a lot.

Studio Days: mixing days

I realise I’ve not posted any photos of myself from the studio days, but then Charthouse Studios themselves posted some shots of me today. So, thank you Ian, for taking some photos of me pretending to play the piano. I’m sure it looks dead natural. These were actually from the last day that I was tracking piano and vocals for the record.

studio daysstudio days

I’m back in the studio next week for a final day to fix the little niggly things that aren’t quite right with the mixes just yet. The mixing days were long, but were really interesting to be honest. It brought so much clarity to what we had tracked, and really cleaned up the tracks so much by refining and shaping the songs to sound the way they should. We covered a lot of ground in a very short space of time, but really, it’s still a record being made on a very tight budget, so that’s to be expected. That said, I’m really pleased with how it has been turning out and I can’t wait until it is all finished and I’m able to share it with people. It definitely has been the best use of my summer possible.

1 … 8 9 10 11 12 … 32