The last few days have been filled with music making, and talking about music making and songwriting. 

Bill Laybourne and I wrote a song together for the first time. We have worked together on other sound projects, and he worked with me on a live performance of Drawing Songs, but we’ve never sat down and written something together. After The Fish Collective field trip to Kilve beach, I wrote some words, and thought they’d give us the opportunity to write something together. The beginning of every collaboration is a bit of a tip-toeing around to see how it might work. The afternoon with Bill started very playfully with a guitar, a shruti box and some general humming. At the end of the afternoon, after Bill had done a bit of editing, we ended up with a short but really interesting piece. Definitely a song. We have another set of words to play with, so we will be having another session soon.

Before the afternoon with Bill I’d spent the morning warming up with the band, looking at songs we’d not played for a while, and also at new material that had been written, and recorded on phones, but needed fleshing out, pinning down arrangements and a few initial harmonies. I love these processes.

That’s why I’m thrilled by the prospect of writing with Michael Clarke again. We had a video chat about songwriting in general (in which he told me I must read Nick Caves interview in Faith Hope and Carnage, which I ordered immediately after finishing the call). We set a few days in the diary for me to go down to his new studio set up in Devon at the beginning of November. 

I’m not a hugely experienced collaborative songwriter, but I know something special when I see it. Michael and I come from very different professional creative backgrounds, and I’m much older than he is, but there’s something in the way we bounce ideas around, that feels like magic. We share music, experiences, and the work is interspersed with our philosophies on life. There’s trust in the room. Bonkers has a chair at the table, and Weirdness is given an extra slice of cake. Out of this soup comes joy in making, love of process…. And inevitably songs that would have been impossible for either of us to make on our own, or with anyone else.

I love it, and I can’t wait!!