Have been greatly taken up with music and songwriting of late, to the exclusion of other writing. This is mainly because I am still waiting to hear from publishers about various literary works. Music offers instant gratification while I wait. The guitar and mandolins sit there in the study, become impossible to ignore. “I’ll just plug in and play a few songs…” which of course turns into hours…
Songwriting is a natural progression from that. I am pretty much always in the process of writing a song and it can take up an almost endless time and not always be productive. And yet when I’m fully engaged in writing a novel or book-length project, I don’t write songs! It’s either one or the other for me, never both at the same time.
However, with my music buddy, after nearly two years of rehearsal, we’re nearing the end of getting twelve tracks into a suitable condition for putting onto a CD. Nothing too ambitious, its essentially a set list and four of them are covers. Eight of the tracks are our own, four of mine, four of his, and they fit within the general category of Scottish traditional folk or acoustic. We’re quite proud of our songs but we’re not expecting to win a Trad Award, at least not this year! It’s just for fun really. The biggest problem we’ve faced and continue to face is the struggle to improve our harmonies. The question of our band name is another issue. We did a gig as Stairheid Rammie but that suggests a ceilidh band, then we got two songs on a charity CD as The Ferryboys and now I’ve suggested Corbies’ Knowe which is an actual place that we both like and it has historical significance. So that might be it. No-one else is using that name, at least according to Mr Google.