New Reality Records is releasing a collection of my songs from a creative season that I titled, Venture of Belief. It is a compilation of collaborative recordings that began when I could not find my people or decide how I wanted to sound after my first band split. Before this I hadn’t had to think about genre or style, we made our own. I would turn up at rehearsal with my song and it all came together with the band. I like to collaborate for many reasons, sometimes social and romantic, as well as creative, but mainly because I never imagine music in terms of beats or basslines. I am a writer who sings. I create melodies, write lyrics and play rhythm guitar, but I am not a musician in the sense of being devoted to playing an instrument or sound production. The songs for Venture of Belief span a season where I went off-grid to find the meaning of life. This period was catastrophic at first. I came close to dying but was saved by an extraordinary sequence of events. I eventually linked into an underground network of otherworldly people in London. I believed I had seen a lot already, maybe too much when this happened, but found so much more that was new. The songs say little about the reality of the situation I found myself in while writing them. They do touch upon the idea of change and adventure, but only lightly. There is a reflection on heartache, but in quite a polite way, the lover asking the other to be honest about their choices. I am more vividly uncensored on this subject in the " Winter of Desire " collection. I buried the recordings of Venture of Belief because my perfectionism got the better of me, they are all so dissimilar, and the uniqueness of each seemed only to echo my creative confusion and what I then believed to be a loss of identity. However, I changed my mind in 2024. It occurred to me that surely a loss of identity is the essence of a new beginning. I also remembered that it is the listener’s experience with a song that matters, not my concerns in terms of categorisation and genre. Maybe I reflect more on the idea of a soul search or mind retrieval than I realise. You can now decide.
I’m a Poppies fan