How many songs is too many songs?

As with guitars, you can never have too many songs, surely? My modern period of writing and recording began around April 2012, although I’d done a lot of noodling guitar instrumentals with beats and synths for many years before that going way back into my teens.

But, this modern period which started in my 40s when I co-established an Arts Night happening got me writing and recording on a more regular and frequent basis. Some of the early stuff is lost to my old SoundCloud page. That said, I could probably resurrect those files if there was a demand. There were also dozens of cover versions, some of which are still on my Youtube and Spotify etc.

Anyway, my recorded musical output, as opposed to the live stuff I do solo, with C5 the band, with bigMouth/TyrannoChorus choir, and in various collaborations with Barbara, Patrick, Liz, and several others is mainly found on my BandCamp pages.

Genre Fluid (2023) – 8 tracks – 32’28”
Lifelines (2022) – 8 tracks – 31’22”
After the Lockdown (2021) – 14 tracks – 63’36”
Lockdown (2020) – 14 tracks – 61’50”
Bridge of Sighs (2019) – 17 tracks – 71’36”
The Sea Refuses No River (2018) – 11 tracks – 44’36”
Who is Really Fooling Who? (2017) – 9 tracks – 33’55”
Detail is a Devil (2017) – 13 tracks – 53’53”
In Transition (2016) – 15 tracks – 64’03”
Push the Button (2015) – 15 tracks – 65’14”
If at first… (2014) – 25 tracks – 98’13”

Total 149 tracks, 11h30m

The chronology of these various collections may be slightly skewed in places, where I shuffled songs from one collection to another over the years. There was at one point an EP called Bait and Switch (2016) and another called Life, Love, Lonicera(2016). The songs from those were spread around the playlists from around that time to make the whole collection more balanced. “Push the Button”, “Wild Honeysuckle” and “Burning Out” ended up on the Push the Button album. “Escape to the Stars”, “The Silent Spring”, “Bait and Switch”, and “White Line Warrior” ended up on the Detail is a Devil album.

I should perhaps adjust the playlists to balance the album lengths properly but there are natural gaps between the songwriting periods of the last 12 years. Anyway, I am now awaiting a new playlist from Clive-upon-Sea who is working his way through all 150 songs, all eleven and a half hours of my music to pull together an Essential Dave Bradley collection.

An analysis of History Written on the Water

My most recent song is out now for streaming and download via BandCamp. I’ve already talked about how it came to be and alluded to the origins of the title in the engraving on young English poet John Keats’ headstone – Here Lies One Whose Name was writ in Water

With this song History Written on the Water I tried to weave a tapestry of imagery and metaphor, exploring themes of secrets, betrayal, faithlessness, loss, and the relentless passage of time.

Artwork for the Dave Bradley song History Written on the Water

Secrets and Betrayal: My lyrics refer to secrets, suggesting that there are hidden truths that have been concealed or obscured. Lines like “The secret’s out, they could’ve lied” and “A candle snuffed from sacred view” imply a sense of betrayal or deception, the allusion to candles hinting at faithlessness.

Metaphorical Imagery: By design or accident, there are numerous metaphors, in particular the history being written on the water, suggesting an impermanence and fluidity of events and the idea that our actions leave no indelible mark on the world. They say history is a lesson to learn, but so often we inore it.

Nature Imagery: Many of my songs talk of the sea, water, tides, often symbolizing loss, death, the passage of time, the inevitability of change, and the depths of the human condition. The mention of “crushing waves beneath the endless skies” hopefully conjures a sense of overwhelming force and vastness.

Contract and Binding: The reference to contracts signed between the lines and the (legal) eagle’s talons tightly binding perhaps suggest a sense of entrapment or obligation, perhaps implying that choices made in the past have lasting consequences.

Yearning for Redemption: The repeated references to finding one’s way back home and reclaiming secrets beneath the waves suggest a longing for redemption or reconciliation. There is a sense of urgency and determination in lines like “No more time left to roam” and “Promise me that you’ll be fine.”

Desolation and Loss: The imagery of “empty bed” and “world gone dark” conveys a sense of desolation and loss, hinting at the aftermath of betrayal or abandonment.

Turning Point: The line “The turnaround is where it ought to be” suggests a moment of realization or reckoning, where the protagonist comes to terms with their circumstances and resolves to move forward. A turnaround, of course, being a musical term for a point in a song where the chord progression or melody flips from the expected to something unexpected but nevertheless satisfying.

History Written on the Water is hopefully a poignant exploration of human experience, using imagery and metaphor to convey themes of secrecy, betrayal, redemption, and the passage of time. In it, I reflect on some of the complexities of life, maybe the transient impact of our actions on the world around us.

You can download or stream my latest song from BandCamp.

History Written on the Water – A song

TL:DR – I’ve written a new song. It’s now on BandCamp and FREE to the first 200 people to download.


John Keats’ headstone in the Cemitero Acattolico famously has the line:

Here Lies One Whose Name was writ in Water

I’d misremembered this or maybe misread it somewhere as history as ephemeral information easily lost, never really solid in the first place, history written on water. Apparently, it was much earlier though, in Beaumont and Fletcher’s play Philaster, 1611: ‘All your better deeds Shall be in water writ, but this in Marble.’ Longfellow quoted Keats’ epitaph in his ode to the ‘young English poet’.

As is my wont, I wrote a few words around this phrase, trying to make a new song. I had a little chord progression that involved two-finger open chords up and down the neck, but fundamentally the progression was Em-C-Am-B. I recorded a demo with the rough words a couple of days before my birthday, but it didn’t really gel. It was sparse, fragile, spare…could’ve been a nice song, perhaps sung by someone else.

I was going to ditch it. But, come Friday evening with an empty house, I went back to basics with those open chords and just played them as I would normally have done at the first positions on guitar with a couple of little tweaks. It was a bit too high for me to sing the melody I’d come up with comfortably, so I stuck a capo on the third fret and dropped my voice to fit.  There are still some high bits, thank goodness for Melodyne assisting me with the accuracy of the upper harmonies.

I worked up my lyrics over the evening and came up with a way to make a chorus work, chopping up the evolving chord progression of the verse and making it a more basic rock pattern. Then a bridge with a spot of modulation, a key change, to open things up and take it back into a final chorus.

So, with lyrics tweaked, three sections in, I ran a 1+1 vocal and guitar, added a second acoustic guitar with a bit of distortion, did a pseudo-mandolin section, tapped along with a MIDI keyboard to add some percussion, and then played a bit of bass. To finish it off, I recorded a fake classical ending using the chords from the verses and pitch-shifted it up an octave to make it sound like a musical box, all very silly, but just an esoteric finale for fun. Some glockenspiel on the MIDI keyboard and a bit of MIDI keyboard for sax too…

It was all quite complex by now and the drums sounded crap. I redid those on cajon a few days later and still it sounded crap. In stepped my friend Dave Oliffe of Giant Audio Studio with whom I’ve been co-producing Cluce-upon-Sea’s latest album. Dave is a fabulous drummer and made an easy job of playing along to my track with the original percussion muted. The final mix is now on the Dave Bradley BandCamp page. There’s a lot going on lyrically and musically in this tune, do give it a couple of listens.

History written on the water

The secret’s out, they could’ve lied
The silent treatment terrified
The missing link, the dimmest spark
The wording just a little too dark

It was always written in ascorbic ink
Unread terms that make you think
A contract signed between the lines
The Eagle’s talons tightly bind

I had to find my way back home
No more time left to roam
My grand designs lost on the breeze
The faithless falling to their knees

CHORUS
Time and tide they wait for no man
Empty promises in disguise
Shallow seas will claim your secrets
Crushing waves beneath the endless skies

CHORUS COUNTERMELODY
They won’t wait for you
Promise me that you’ll be fine
Won’t you just reclaim your secret
Beneath the waves, there’s a better view

The secret’s out, they could’ve told you
A candle snuffed from sacred view
A world gone dark your plans unmade
An empty bed the price that’s paid

It was always written in ascorbic ink
All terms unread won’t make you think
A contract signed between the lines
The Eagle’s talons tightly bind

You’re history written in the water
The turnaround is where it ought to be
Unholy ground that nothing saves
The words unread, far beneath the waves


Some of the lyrics are deliberate cliches, like the whole “time and tide” refrain because I often allude to the sea in my music. Ascorbic ink, in case you couldn’t see right through that was an allusion to invisible ink made from lemon juice. Originally, it was the (legal) Eagle’s hidden talons. I think the closing “You’re history” was originally “Your history”, but then I thought it could also mean “you are history”, meaning “you’re finished”.

To be honest, I’ve no idea what the song is about, secrets, plans gone wrong, contracts, lawyers, faith, the sea, drowning? Maybe subconsciously I’ve written a song about The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.

 

The James Bond chord – Em/M9

John Barry famously wrote the classic James Bond movie scores. But, the “James Bond Theme”, the guitar-led main signature, which has featured in every Bond film since Dr. No in 1962 was composed by Monty Norman. Barry, of course, utilised his own arrangements of this piece as a kind of 007 fanfare and for the seminal gun barrel sequence in many of the Bond films.

The guitar motif in the original was recorded by guitarist Vic Flick on a Clifford Essex Paragon Deluxe through a Fender Vibrolux amplifier. Apparently, Flick was paid £6 for the session, about 100 quid in today’s money. At the end of the tune there is a famously suspenseful guitar chord which makes full use of that Vibrolux. The chord in question is an E-minor/major-9 chord, sometimes styled Emin/Maj9. The E-minor triad is made up of the root 1st, minor 3rd, and the perfect 5th notes of the E-minor scale, namely E-G-B. To make the major-ninth chord, you add the major 9th interval, namely the F#. But of course, to get there you have to go via the major 7th, which is the D# of the E-minor scale.

This is a four-finger shape, a diagonal across the fretboard from the seventh fret on the B-string to the tenth fret on the A-string when playing in standard EADGBE tuning on a six-string guitar. The bottom-E string is open, the top E is muted. Strummed fairly slowly from low string to high with a pick and a lot of vibrato from the amp, gives us the dramatic arpeggio that is essentially the closure of the James Bond musical signature.

Now, at this point, if you have a fair musical ear, you might be thinking the sound of that chord is rather familiar from another jazz tune used in the movies. And, you’d be right, the very same min/maj9 type chord is used with a descending glissando at the end of the Henry Mancini theme to The Pink Panther (1963). Perhaps this was a little musical joke on the part of Mancini who would, of course, be very familiar with the work of Norman and Barry.

More Classic Chords to be found here.

Never thought that I would be affeinted – Wuh?

We’ve recently added Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush’s song Don’t Give Up from PG’s So album to our choir repertoire. Bizarrely, aside from the tempo of the scored arrangement being weirdly high and the syncopation of the Gabriel parts as written not being quite right rhythmically, there’s also a very odd word printed on the score…affeinted…it’s in the line “never thought that I would be…”. It should say “affected” but it says “affeinted”.

The word on the original vinyl album lyric sheet, which I just dug out from our collection is “affected”, obviously.

That said, it does sound a bit like PG is almost singing affeinted, but I suspect it’s either a vocal affectation or a mixing artefact. These things happen when you process a recorded vocal. Once when I’d over-egged the EQ on one of my own vocal recordings it sounded like I had a lisp. It was easily reversed. Another time, it sounded like I was “short-tongued”, I’m not, it was a mixing artefact. And, yet another time, some listeners misinterpreted my singing the neologism “funktastic” with no “n” in the word! I definitely wasn’t.

Anyway, I think we in the choir have all corrected our scores ahead of any forthcoming gigs. Not sure if we have to do the hugging thing like Kate and Peter yet…

A decade of pantomime! Oh yes it was

As I’ve mentioned before. The Cottenham Theatre Workshop’s (CTW) longstanding Musical Director, the inimitable Barbara D, recruited me as guitarist for the pit band back in 2013. I actually played bass guitar that first year as regular cellist, David A, was treading the boards for the first time. David A was back in the pit for Cinderella and so I switched to six-string guitar and played that for every show thereafter.

2013 – A Christmas Carol

2014 – Cinderella

2015 – Puss in Boots (No band, MD was the late Debbie C)

2016 – The Wizard of Oz

2017 – Aladdin

2018 – Worzel Gummidge

2019 – Sleeping Beauty

2020 – No Panto (covid)

2021 – Treasure Island

2022 – The Nutcracker

2023 – Peter Panto

We usually had Rob W on clarinet except in 2023. Georgia D on flute for my first couple of shows, and also Michael K on saxophone. Matthew P on drums for the first couple, whom I replaced with Adam S (from C5 the band) John K understudied a couple of performances for Adam. Christian on cello, Tanara on clarinet and oboe.

From my privileged position in the pit, looking up at the stage, I’ve usually taken a few photos of the cast during rehearsals for CTW publicity, although I don’t seem to have started doing that until Oz in 2016. 2023 was a record-breaking year in terms of ticket sales, outstripping the previous record in 2022.

While I didn’t join in with CTW until 2013, I had been asked when we first moved to Cottenham in 1998 by Clive B to tread the boards, but didn’t have the confidence. I seem to remember talking to Barbara about her joining the pit band around about the turn of the millennium though and she was definitely onboard from around that time…

It will be all change musically in 2024…watch this space.

Like a flame to a moth – a song

Having collaborated with two of my very good, musical friends this month on two distinct songs, I assumed that would be the end of my musical inspiration, at least until 2024. But, then I was on Threads, and happened upon the account of singer-songwriter janapochop.

Cut to the chase, here’s my new song – Like a flame to a moth. It’s NOT about moths…

In the spirit of finding new music, I checked out her Spotify and there are some wondrous songs to be heard. In particular one called Pretty Please. Jana describes this, her latest song, as having been “produced by me in my bedroom in Brooklyn…but I tried to make it sound like the New Mexico desert night sky.” It is wonderfully evocative and having visited New York and New Mexico a long time ago it struck a chord.

It also struck something else and made me think that I hadn’t tried to write that kind of imagery in a song for a long time. So, I sat down and let the lyrics flow. I then thought about grabbing a guitar and doing my usual singer-songwriter type approach to coming up with the chords and a melody, but nothing felt right. So, I turned to my music software and grabbed a few built-in loops, some harp, some strings, a few beats, and pulled a song structure together with the intention if ad libbing the lyrics over the top of it and then recording live instruments to fit after the fact.

Well, the loops were nice enough and the lyrics evolved, a melody came forth. I pulled a weird middle section together with live guitar and bass. Somehow, this spilled into the following loop section and nudged me to restructure the lyrics and to create something of a refrain. Fun AND games.

Needless to say once I had a demo, I re-recorded the vocals, added some harmonies, pulled together a proper guitar track, added a solo, did a fairly heavy and funky bassline to fit and then mixed it down. A couple of days later I was extending the refrain, adding a little more vocal and mixing it down to the song that’s on my BandCamp page right now. As with most of my songs, it’s genre fluid, starts off a little proggie, builds to a power ballad thing, breaks to some funk rock and then goes full-on crossover for the finale. I suppose bottom line, it’s like Peter Gabriel was doing Big Time while he was still with Genesis in 1973…ish…

Anyway, Jana had a listen, which pleased me no end, and had this to say:

“HOLY this is AWESOME!! This is a whole journey and it’s already stuck in my head – glad to have maybe sparked this but you created a whole world here!!”

…which pleased me no end again.

Long-time collaborator Andrea T had this to say about the song:

“It sounds fantastic – I especially like the chorus, with that driving rhythm and the way it all builds around the swirling arpeggios. The kind of ‘spare’ quality of your voice is quite Peter Gabriel adjacent, and the timbre of some specific words in this one, especially ‘firedoor’, ‘heartbeat’, and ‘blame’… quite uncanny. Actually, think it’s one of the best things you’ve done!”

Like a flame to a moth

Someone’s running up the stair
Brushing metal, stepping hard
The trembling painted banister
The firedoor, insanely barred

There’s no smoking in the kitchen
But, the fire’s out of control
The flames they flickered with your heartbeat
The smoke it lingered in your soul

Like a moth to a flame
Like a flame to a moth
You’re finding its caress
Feeds the burning of the cloth

Like a flame to a moth
Like a moth to a flame
You’re hiding your distress
in the playing of the game

Like a moth to a flame
Like a flame to a moth
It’s knowing your success
Is someone else’s loss

Like a flame to a moth
Like a moth to a flame
It’s the ticking of the clock
The acceptance of blame

There’s a light on in the hallway
Its wires they go deep underground
It’s pulsing to the time of your heartbeat
Yet it didn’t make a sound


Here’s the link to the song again – Like a flame to a moth

Genre Fluid

Just packaging up six of my most recent songs and musical collaborations that cross over some diverse styles. I’m releasing them as a maxi-EP or a mini-LP, depending on whether you’re glass half-full or half-empty, under the title Genre Fluid for the bargain-bin price of $5 or a dollar each if you want each song separately.

AI generated album cover. Surrreal desert scene with what looks like a long-haired man in a suit standing on a rock starting at an enormous shiny vinyl album in front of which are various contraptions and devices that resemble some kind of radio-punk, as opposed to steam-punk drumkit. In the foreground is a silver and black orb with wires and to the right of that a silvery blob that could almost be a discus of solid mercury. Perhaps if it were liquid that would fit with the genre fluid idea...
AI generated album art – surreal desert scene

It’s Not Our Time for the Sea is the most recent of the collection with lyrics by Andrea Thomson (from C5 the band) and me. It’s about the abusive relationship between man and Mother Earth, a mish-mash of prog, pop, funk, rock and dare I say it hip-hop and gospel.

My Light, My Sky is about displaced friendships with lyrics by yours truly and Simon Oliver, whom you may know from Clive-upon-Sea’s Fragments album, which was produced by yours truly. This song is a largely percussion-free acoustic singer-songwriter tune, a bit of a Floydian slip if you ask me with some pedal steel guitar suggested by long-time Sciencebase online friend Steelfolk, aka Dr Keith Walker.

Ticking Clocks kicks off like a prog rock song but flips into lounge lizard jazz with Adam Stewart from C5 the Band on drums and synth. It’s lyrically a kind of sequel to She’s Leaving Home.

Take the Waters was inspired by a conversation with Rachel another member of our choir The TyrannoChorus. The track is another singer-songwriter thing with pseudo-choral harmonies, maybe next time I’ll bring the choir together for my songs.

Old Nick is Quick is an uptempo punky little number about getting away with it, or not, as the case may be.

Festival Friends are Cool as Folk is a fingerstyle guitar instrumental improvised after I took part in a guitar workshop with Nigel Wearne.

Here’s that link again – Genre Fluid, the max-EP, or mini-LP.

Alternative album cover for Genre Fluid. AI generated shows an acoustic guitar floating downstream in a ravine towards the sun
Alternative album cover – guitar floating on a river in a rocky gorge

It’s not our time for the sea – a song

Andrea T from C5 the band, mentioned in passing that she’d had a dream where she wrote a song, but she could only remember the following line – “She said, it’s not my time for the sea”.

AI generative artwork based on a prompt asking for forest fires and the sea in the style of Hipgnosis
Hipgnosis-style generative art cover

Well, having worked with co-founder and erstwhile member of our Arts Night collective Simon Oliver on a song last week (My Light, My Sky), I felt like I was on a roll and came up with some lyrics to hang around Andrea’s phrase. The words evolved over the course of a couple of days with input from Andrea as well as a beautiful additional verse from her.

I then set about pulling together some music using various loops and adding my own bass playing, lead guitar, acoustic intro, and vocals. You can think of the final song as being about an abusive relationship, where humanity is the abuser and Mother Earth is the victim.

It’s definitely a genre fluid song – starts with a pseudoclassical figure on my Taylor acoustic guitar, goes into a proggie-folk section, which builds to me playing some heavy Lifesonesque guitar on an Ibanez electric, then breaks down into a sort of Radiohead meet The Lotus Eaters mid-section before heading into funk-rock with a splash of gospel, leaning into a bit of hip-hop with a nod to Adamski and Seal via Chic and George Benson. My bass part nods knowingly to The Temptations’ song My Girl. Did I already say it was genre fluid?

It’s not our time for the sea

You’ll never know what hit you
You’ll only bear the scars
You’ll never find the peace in you
just staring at the stars

Beyond the pain there’s yearning
to chase away the night
The futile hope of turning
the bending of the light

I’ll tell you what your problem is
You never can concede
Give and take will always fail
when there is wanton greed

You’ve got to find a shelter
in your happy place
It’s not about your pride
it’s not about saving face

We walked through barren fields
We saw the forest fires
We raised up all our wicker men
The silhouetted pyres

We felt the rising of the tide
Our homes we had to flee
She said “The world will always turn
but it’s not my time for the sea”

They say that water always wins
but that’s the nature of the game
The seasons are eliding
yet the land can still reclaim
She said ‘Those scars will heal with time
as dust returns to earth’
The sea remains but still
we chase the hope of our re-birth

Barefoot in the water seems a lesson out of class
Tread carefully now, there may well be a little broken glass
If the pressure’s on the rise, the change could crush our pride
And in the end, my dear, we could always say that we all tried

My Light, My Sky – AI artwork for a song

I realise there’s a lot of ongoing debate regarding generative AI tools, especially those that have putatively been trained on copyright material without permission from the creators. It’s generally impossible to know what work has been used as source data for the likes of Dall-E, ChatGPT, and MidJourney etc, unless you work in their back office, presumably. However, I do know that some of my copyright material, books, potentially website content, photos, and perhaps even some of my music, will have been used to train various AIs over the last few years.

AI generated artwork with sullen sky, mountains, a central tree and a weird river
AI-generated artwork with sullen sky, mountains, a central tree and a weird river

I think there needs to be some kind of permission system in place and a royalty/payback system to compensate artists and creators for the use of the output as training data. I suspect that horse has bolted, as it were, and neither of those things will come to pass. Meanwhile, I feel that given that a lot of my content is likely to have been used to train AIs, I’m almost justified in clawing something back from those AIs.

In this case, I have used a couple of tools to generate an image as artwork for my latest song, My Light, My Sky, the origins of which and the development thereof I mentioned here recently.

First, I asked ChatGPT to come up with a prompt for an image AI to help me generate some Hipgnosis-type artwork for my song. My initial prompt to ChatGPT told it to “act as an expert in album artwork” and to “give me a prompt to use with a generative AI for creating images”. I added the lyrics from my song as part of the initial prompt and this is what ChatGPT came back with:

Generate an album cover in the style of Hipgnosis that captures the essence of a journey, the intertwining elements of water, dreams, and loss. Incorporate surreal and symbolic imagery such as raindrops turning into streams, rivers flowing to the sea, and scenes of introspection. Use a color palette that conveys both the beauty and melancholy of the lyrics. Ensure that the cover evokes a sense of mystery, emotion, and the passage of time. Consider including elements like shattered dreams, reflections, and a connection to the sea as central motifs.

I then used that prompt in Img2Go’s AI Creator Studio to get it to produce an appropriate image to which I could add the song title and my name. It looks rather evocative and Hipgnosis-like although that tree that looks like a Cedar of Lebanon or a chink of broccoli is reminiscent of Yes album artist Roger Dean.

I ran the AI a second time and got a similarly evocative image, but without the tree. I imagined this one as the back of the record sleeve for my putative 7-inch. I added the lyrics to the graphic:

A couple more iterations with some minor tweaks to the prompt that ChatGPT had given me generated some amusing images with silhouetted figures. In one, a woman is seen standing up to her waist in water and carrying an umbrella. This is quite a nice idea for an album cover…very Hipgnosis, very Magritte. The ludicrous notion of being soaked up to the waist but protecting one’s upper half from the rain with an umbrella! The album might have been entitled “Staying Dry” or “Underwater” or something…

Another version of the same prompt, simply adding the word umbrella to the end generated this: