Tag Archives: music

Story of the Song – Grimspound

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800px-Grimspound_view_2I find the moors of the West Country deeply inspiring. If ever I’m feeling any kind of disconnection from the Source of my inspiration, a visit to the moors will often reopen the floodgates for the Awen to flow once more. I was feeling that disconnection just before I wrote this song so I got into my car and headed west.

I knew where I was going – it’s a pilgrimage I take at least once a year, to Merrivale and Grimspound on Dartmoor.

Grimspound is a late Bronze Age settlement high on the moor. It’s surrounded by a large fallen stone wall, and inside you can still see the remains of the roundhouses. On a beautiful day it is incredibly peaceful, but on a typical Dartmoor day, with the wind and the rain, it must have been a harsh place to live.

I sat with my guitar inside the remains of one of the roundhouses and just began to play on the guitar – looking around, breathing in the history of the place, imagining it full of life. What kind of people lived there. A Raven called overhead, and I felt I could see torchlight on the Tors either side of me. Voices of the Ancestors singing. The Land singing. And the melody of the guitar began to take shape. A ghostly and reflective refrain.

 

“The wind and the rain, still whisper its name, and the name that they whisper, Grimspound.”

 

Deep in the Wild Land,

Placed by a cold hand,

A tribe of the Heartland,

A world far away…

 

At the time of the settlement much of Dartmoor would still have been forest.

 

The forest surrounds them,

And Spirit has found them,

They drink from the fountain,

On the noon of the day…

 

The water source is still there, running through the settlement.

The song came in waves. Voices telling their story. Me listening, writing.

It truly is a magical place. A year or so later on a clear night Cerri and I initiated two people as Druids. There is no light polution that reaches that far onto the moor. I had never seen to many stars.

The initiates waited in one of the roundhouses, and we brought each one, in turn, to the larger roundhouse and each one took that step onto the path of the modern Druid.

No sounds other than our voices, and the occasional breath of wind, and maybe the whispered blessing of the Ancestors.

Grimspound – The Hills they are Hollow

Update on the Royal Albert Hall Pagan Music concert

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I’ve been asked a number of times recently how the plans are going for the Pagan music concert at the Royal Albert Hall idea I had last year. The simple answer is that it’s still ongoing but I’ve encountered a couple of issues that have made things a little more complicated.

The most recent is that, on contract, every event held at the hall must have the possibility of selling it out. Now I know we can get enough people to pay for the event – at £30 per ticket that only needs 1000 people and that is very much achievable. But to sell it out would be 3900. That’s a lot to ask.

So I’m thinking about how we can get closer to that figure using the Kickstarter campaign concept to raise the finance to pay for the hall. It would mean that instead of making the target 1000 donation/payments of £30 (each £30 gets a ticket to the concert), we would probably have to get closer to the sell out point, in advance, with no fixed date for the event.

I’m beginning to wonder if that might be just a little too much to ask of the community at this time.

So the idea and willingness are very much still there, and I’m still in negotiation/discussions with the hall. It just needs to be an achievable goal when and if things come together to make it happen.

DruidCast – A Druid Podcast Episode 73

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Shownotes for DruidCast Episode 73

None the Wiser – Chris Wood - www.chriswoodmusic.co.uk

Talky bit – Paganism in Early and Late Medieval Literature – Professor Marion Gibson

The Great World Tree – Cernunnos Rising - www.cernunnosrising.co.uk

Crudette – Blanche Rowen and Mike Gulston - www.rowengulston.co.uk

Link to Atlantis Eternal on Amazon - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Atlantis-Eternal-ebook/dp/B008O2MVDK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343227255&sr=8-1

DruidCast theme – The Hills they are Hollow – Damh the Bard - www.paganmusic.co.uk

For further information about the Druid tradition - www.druidry.org

Direct Download - http://ec.libsyn.com/p/1/1/0/1109b989242c72b1/DruidCast_SHOW73_OBOD.mp3

Free Meditation Music – Willow Dream – Damh the Bard

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This is a piece of meditation music I created for Sacred Nature – Meditations For Health & Healing With The Golden Mean by Philip Carr-Gomm. It was a very different experience recording this piece, and I have to say it was hard to focus as I kept finding myself drifting off into some other place. It’s how I knew the music would work for its intended purpose. So I recommend you listen through headphones, in a peaceful place, close your eyes, and dream into the Willow. Enjoy!!

 

Help Tuatha Dea with their community Pagan music album

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I met the band Tuatha Dea last year at the Pagan Spirit Gathering in Illinois and I knew in that moment we were going to get along. The band emerged from a ritual drumming group into what is one of the finest and most entertaining Pagan bands around. They play a good deal of Irish music, but behind the musicians is always the drumming. It is the heartbeat of the band. I saw them play at the PSG three times and each time they held the audience in the palm of their hands – ending two gigs with members of the band walking into the audience and bringing people onto the stage to play along on the many drums. By the end I think the band could have even stopped playing and joined the remaining audience members and leave the now drumming audience to it! It was a great piece of stagecraft.

My last gig at PSG was at midday and to celebrate I invited Arthur Hinds, Celia, and Tuatha Dea to join me for Hills they are Hollow. The crowd loved it, and so did I. Singing along with Celia, and with Arthur joining on Bodhran and vocal, then behind us the powerhouse of the Tuath Dea drummers. It was amazing.

I’m delighted that I’ve been asked to play as one of the guests on their latest album. It’s a great idea – they have invited lots of other Pagan musicians to guest to create a celebration of Pagan music. So there’s me, Celia, members of Spiral Rhythm, and Murphy’s Midnight Rounders to name just a few. It’s going to be  great album, and I’ve just received the song I’ll be playing on – it’s right up my street and I’ve been playing along, creating my new parts, already.

Here’s the thing.

The band want to make this a community funded album too, and they have created a Kickstarter campaign so that you lovely people can make a donation in return for some groovy rewards. The deadline to raise the finance for the album is 29th April, so if you would like to help with a donation, no matter how small, please go to the site and do it now.

The campaign can be found here.

But enough from me, let the lovely people of the band tell you more about it!

Oh! And if you would share this blog on your Facebook and Twitter accounts etc that would be very much appreciated.

A Nostalgic walk to the Record Store…

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rattrapDo you remember the first single you ever bought? I bet you do. And probably the first album too.

The first single I bought was Rat Trap by The Boomtown Rats.

I remember saving up my pocket money and walking with my friend down to Mastersound in Haywards Heath, the only record shop in town, and looking through the singles charts until I saw it there and asking for the number (ok, I can’t remember the number it was in the charts) single it was. He handed it over, I paid my cash, and we walked home.

I played that single to death. Over and over again, and the B side too, that ‘something extra’, the hidden beauty on the reverse side of the record. I mean, when I say played it to death I really mean that. I put it on, played it, lifted the needle back to the beginning, played it again, and again, and again. And I know from talking to other people I wasn’t alone in doing this.

Back in the day buying music was a journey. I heard songs on the radio, or on Top of the Pops. If I couldn’t afford the single I sat by my radio listening to the top 40 being played on a Sunday evening, finger ready to press the record button, and when it came on I recorded it from the radio. Dreadful recordings, but I had the song!

The same was true for albums. The first album I bought with my own money was Strangers in the Night, the double live album by UFO. I saw them playing Doctor Doctor on Top of the Pops and this time bypassed the single and went straight for the album.

I played that to death too. I still have all of my albums, but they are in the loft – no vinyl record player in the house any more.

I’m not bemoaning the transformation from vinyl to CD. In truth I hated vinyl for its fragility. It seemed I could just put an album that had no scratches away fine, and when I pulled it from the sleeve next time it had either warped, or been scratched. I loved the CD. It was smaller, yes, but I still had that sense of journey when buying it. It still had sleeve notes and cover art I could read, and look at, whilst listening to the music. The recording quality was also amazing.

But as with the cassette tape and vinyl record, we have sacrificed quality for convenience. Along came the MP3. Napster, iTunes and peer to peer file sharing have changed everything. Now when I want an album I just open the iTunes app on my iPhone, find the album, and download it. I have it in seconds. I do like the convenience, but that sense of journey has gone. I wonder how many people value those MP3s in the same way that they value a record or CD collection?

Am I just an old dinosaur? See, to me, something has been lost forever in the way we now consume our music. I can also see streaming services like Spotify and Rdio being used more. Services where we take out a monthly subscription, and then have access to an almost infinite number of albums and songs to ‘stream’. Albums that we can also download to an app for ‘offline listening’. But we could spend £120 a year for the rest of our lives, and not own one single album from spending that money… And if the music service changes their policy, increases their price, or goes bust, we lose all of those playlists and ‘offline listening’ albums, maybe having spent £120 for 5 or 10 years. I find that passing over of my own choices a little weird.

I understand ‘progress’.  I can see and experience the convenience of downloading music from iTunes etc. Things have moved on. But with the demise of HMV and other music stores I can also see something I loved as a young boy disappearing forever. I liked the experience of buying music from a shop, and think we are a little worse off without it for our children and grand children.

But there we go, things move on.

Ceridwen and Taliesin – The Making of Antlered Crown and Standing Stone

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Okay, one day late with the music post…

Here’s the final ‘making of’ video that tells of the inspiration behind the song Ceridwen and Taliesin, from my new album Antlered Crown and Standing Stone.

I hope you’ve enjoyed these little videos as much as I’ve nejoyed putting them together.

Previous videos in the series:

Antlered Crown and Standing Stone

Under a Beltane Sun

Brighid

Branwen’s Lament

Sons and Daughters (of Robin Hood)

The Dreaming

The January Man

Silent Moon

Down in the Garden

Devotional – I’d go with that

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acsscoverrbgAround the 1st November last year I pressed the ‘burn CD’ button on my computer that created the final master CD of my new album that would be sent off to be pressed. Cerri had done the artwork, it was finished. 3 years of writing and a year of recording and there it was in my hand.

The last time I held a master CD of my own songs was back in 2008 and it had been The Cauldron Born. Since then so much had happened. My music was now being heard all over the world, and I was travelling to those places and hearing voices sing back the words I had written. I thank the Gods every day for my life, and I thank you all as well for bringing the dream of an 8 year old boy who had just been bought his first guitar and was driving his parents crazy, singing his heart out, dreaming of a day when he might do exactly what I now do for a living, to reality.

But what of this album?

Back in 2008 when I pressed the same ‘burn CD’ button to create the master of The Cauldron Born I was exhausted. When compared to my previous three albums The Cauldron Born was different. It held within it songs that dealt with very human issues, the Pagan songs were personal, the topics sometimes challenging, but it also had anthems a-plenty. The opening songs of the previous 3 albums were anthemic, stirring. The opening song of The Cauldron Born began in a gentler way, and was a deeply personal take on the Pagan view. I sent it off wondering how it would be received.

Now I held in my hand the master of Antlered Crown and Standing Stone. How did this album compare with the other 6? More importantly how did it compare to The Cauldron Born and the previous 3 albums of my own music?

I thought about the journey of writing and recording it.

The first song had been Under a Beltane Sun, written about 7 months after The Cauldron Born had been released. Then came Silent Moon. The others arrived over the next couple of years. My songs obviously come from my own journey as a Pagan Druid. When I listen to the songs on my albums they are like a diary of where I’m at spiritually. The new album had quite a lot of slower more reflective songs on it, and this matched where I was with my relationship to my Path. It worried me a little that it might be too gentle so I played the demos to a few people and it was one of my Czech friends who, when I said I was nervous about the gentleness of the album, said, “It can’t be Beltane all the time.” And in that moment I knew he was right and any fear that this new album might not be as well received fell away.

So I sent off the master. The CDs returned, the album became available on iTunes and Amazon, and CDs began to go out in the post. I was happy with it, but how would you, dear listener, how would you like the new songs? It seems that my initial worry, that the album would be too reflective, was unfounded. Thank you for all of the wonderful feedback. I found a review of the album online during which the writer called the album a ‘devotional’ album. I think that hit the nail right on the head. I called it reflective, but it really is a collection of devotional songs, and I’m really happy with that.

When I finished The Cauldron Born I was exhausted and didn’t write a song for over 6 months. The journey of Antlered Crown and Standing Stone had been different. 2013 marks the 10th Anniversary of Herne’s Apprentice, my debut album. When I look back at my musical journey over those 10 years I am so happy with where it has taken me. I’m more at home with my music than ever before, and I’m looking with excitement to the future and what it will bring.

And I cannot wait to get writing and creating again.

An ancient Triad says that, Those who would be a Bard must take up harp, and sorrow, and the wandering road. I do accept the sorrows of life, but I would also add joy, excitement, wonder, friendship, and peace to that Triad.

Here’s to 2013!

Silent Moon – The Making of Antlered Crown and Standing Stone

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Continuing the series of short ‘making of’ videos, this one tells the story behind the song Silent Moon, dedicated to our Lady of the Night Sky.

The new album, Antlered Crown and Standing Stone, is available here

Previous videos can be found here:

Antlered Crown and Standing Stone

Under a Beltane Sun

Brighid

Branwen’s Lament

Sons and Daughters (of Robin Hood)

The Dreaming

The January Man