Hello.
Having gone public with Android Angel 6 months ago and toured it around England, Scotland, France and Germany, I feel the size of my accrued mailing lists just about justifies this indulgent foray into the world of blogging. When I recorded my debut album, 'Bless', last year, I documented the process in a journal and thought it might be nice to come online to do the same thing for album #2.
Android Angel was a project set up for two main reasons. The first was so that I could keep performing music live on a regular basis during the periods of inactivity with the band I sing in - arcs. The second was because I'd come to need a creative outlet that had absolutely no agenda whatsoever as for 10 years the band has been very focused on 'making it'. Not that the band hasn't been the most beautiful rollercoaster of heartbreak and wonder, but I just felt I needed an avenue where I could write and create whatever I wanted with absolutely no restrictions and for nothing but pure enjoyment.
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In 2003, on finishing University I felt truly free for the first time. I'd lost all interest in academia the moment I started playing guitar at 15. But it was 'just a fad' so I proceeded to spend the next six years cultivating a supreme ability to stare at a blank wall for hours on end as various economic, early-modern historic, and then sociological theories swept through one ear and out of the other. To that end, I often, perhaps falsely, promise myself I'm 6 years behind my contemporaries.
But in that Summer, inspired by the lyrics of The Doors, I dived head first into the poetry of William Blake and continued on to Edgar Allan Poe, Jack Kerouac, Arthur Rimbaud, and of couse, being a rock musician, Bill Hicks. I found verses and words that immediately began re-shaping the person I was and towards the artist I'd always hoped, and undeniably felt destined to become:
"to become a visionary one must immerse oneself in the poisons of every form of love, madness and suffering keeping only their quintessences... he arrives at the unknown... there will be other horrible workers who will continue from the horizons where he has succumbed" - Rimbaud.
"he who doubts from what he sees will ne'er believe do as you please: if the sun and moon should doubt they'd immediately go out" - Blake.
"all that we see, all that we seem is just a dream within a dream" - Poe.
It taught me that to gain my own unique perspective I had to see everything my own way and I wanted to express all the beautiful things I saw through music.
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I have had few chances to sit down and play the guitar or piano since November owing to the first 30 or so Android shows I have rehearsed for and performed in that time along side three arcs rehearsals a week and recording the new arcs EP. However, I am starting to collate the ideas I do have and work on some vague structures. I have been writing down what I want to achieve from the second album and things I want to try. A big priority at the moment is giving album 2 much more space than album 1. Current working song titles include: Glow Worm, Unfinished Business, Point Blank Cupid, Seasons, Why Am I So In Love With You?, Marks and Spencer Yum Yums, Fill the Pages, Love With No Reason, For A Sleepless Friend, Let Me Love You.
I have two days in a studio in London booked for June at which I hope to record two of the more complex tracks, and the rest I plan to record over four weeks in the summer in Surrey.
AA x
"Hey!" in Paris - 04/09:
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