This week my second single Adelaide came out. I wrote this song on a really warm, beautiful day at the end of September 2023 when I was a bit hungover and anxious. I’d planned to do a writing session with Ben, a friend I’ve known for years. I woke up in Ladywell after a gig slightly fuzzy headed, had two strong coffees and set off to his to write.
Ben & I had done one writing session together around 2018, so …a fairly long time ago. Co-writing is often quite odd for want of a better word. It can be hard to take such a personal, intangible creative process and make it collaborative. Translating something that is somewhat ethereal and magical and liminal space-y when done alone. But when we wrote that afternoon, despite my apprehension and hangxiety, it was one of the most organic and fluid experiences writing with somebody else that I’ve had.
I think this is largely due to the fact that the majority of the day was spent talking and catching up on the previous few years where we hadn’t seen one another. We wrote the song in about two hours, after talking extensively and openly over (another) coffee for about two hours. (Why am I anxious? It’s a mystery…). After writing most of the song together in one fell, flow state swoop we went down the road to a café to have a jacket potato and continue talking. After that we finished the song and recorded the demo in one take using his laptop mic.
When I left the session I felt light and kind of elated.
It’s written in an alternate tuning, CGCFCE, which means I now take two guitars to every gig I do because I’m not confident enough to tune my guitar during my set. This makes me feel like a bit of a diva and it hurts my back lugging them both around but I think it’s worth it to be able to play it.
When Ben & I wrote the song, it felt okay and natural and almost necessary to really ‘go there’. To say the things I had been feeling, to be exacting and honest and to avoid obfuscating the truth in order to stay safe and smoke-screened. Sometimes it’s right to use nature metaphors and sometimes it’s right to say “I didn’t mean to fuck him up, but I can’t help the way I love”.
Writing Adelaide felt acutely cathartic, like writing honestly should ideally feel. But as often happens when you really “go there”, there’s the very real possibility of subsequently feeling too vulnerable and exposed. Unsure, somewhere in your psyche, of whether you want this part of you to become public, even if you’re not sure anyone will ever actually hear it, and even less so be able to decipher what you’re getting at emotionally/narratively speaking. You feel like a snail poking it’s eyes out to get a better view of a tasty looking leaf and retracting them defensively, reflexively at the first sign of movement. You wonder if you want to be seen or to see so clearly, you wonder if you really want to say anything that feels so irrefutable and concrete. Sometimes the things you make show the things you feel more clearly than you can articulate to yourself in your day-to-day life.
If you’re as historically unsure & mercurial re: your internal world as me, it feels odd to ever be making a statement— Even to yourself, even in something as personal as a song. Even if it is what you mean, even if it is what you feel. Though the subject matter isn’t particularly explicit if you don’t know me, I don’t think that it’s that deeply buried either.
The song looks at a few facets and situations in my life over the last four years and how they intersect. It explores queerness & it’s realisation. Fear, denial, acquiescence. The dystopian, surreal shit show that was covid. Premature domesticity with a partner & the process of clumsily railing against it. The hurt & confusion that is caused when you can’t say what you mean or what you need. The process of learning what feels wrong. The process of learning what feels right. Guilt & frustration at repeated patterns of behaviour.
It is also a hopeful song, a bit of a love letter to listening to yourself for the sake of not only your own mental wellbeing, but everyone you come into contact with.
Recording the EP in Oli Bayston’s amazing Studio Orbb in Walthamstow with an the band was a watershed moment for me. I found myself unexpectedly emotional I walked into the studio on the first day and saw all set up in the round for us to play. We recorded live and kept going as a band until we got the takes that felt right.
The track was deeply enriched by Ben Reed’s phenomenal fretless bass and Joe Harris’s keening slide guitar, Liam’s impeccable drumming and Oli’s deft & emotive piano playing. These musicians took the song soaring off into a space that I feel evokes a sprawling internal emotional world, with all of the conflicting feelings, and the headiness and drama and confusion of relationships.
Also I want to say a major thank you to the wonderful Animesh Raval who sound engineered the whole session and who made me feel so calm and safe and asked me how I was feeling many times, and was patient with me when I consistently, erratically moved my face away from his carefully placed vocal mic.
Film maker extraordinaire & general legend Gregg Houston came in and documented us all working together during the recording, and he’s made a gorgeous mini-doc: ‘The Making of There’s A Time’, with five sections. Each segment looks at a song from the EP.
You can watch the segment exploring Adelaide below for a taste of what those few days in the studio with everybody looked & felt like. Gregg was so calm and unobtrusive, and just such a fun presence during a really intimate process. I didn’t even realise he was there most of the time which is definitely a good thing.
NB; In this segment I say that Ben and I had never written a song before which is…simply not true…we did one writing session before, way back in 2018. Amnesia brought on by intense recording vibes/adrenaline/overwhelm I reckon.
Anyway hope you’re having a wonderful weekend if you’re reading this and also if you’re not reading this. And thank you for reading and hopefully listening to Adelaide.
Yoshi x
Unrelated things that I am enjoying :
I’m currently in France (jammy fkn biatch) so right now, predictably, I am 90% red wine, incomparable cheese and random amazing patisserie that you seem to be able to find in every boulangerie everywhere including on the side of random A roads. So far i’ve enjoyed Tarte au Fraise and something called ‘Le Royal’, a kind of…incredible, light chocolatey mousse cake with a kit kat-esque base.
I’ve been listening to the album ‘Cardinal’ by Pinegrove a lot recently. Aphasia was always my favourite song on that album but on the plane earlier this week I found myself putting the first song, ‘Old Friends’ on repeat, and crying whilst looking out of the plane window. “How come every outcomes such a comedown?” The lyrics on that album are second to none. I’ve never been a good flier but this was a salve. Maggie Milner references another song, Cadmium, from the album in her book ‘Couplets: A Love Story’ which I mentioned in my last post.
For the last few months I’ve been on/off reading an early book called ‘Trip to Echo Spring’ by Olivia Laing about alcoholism in writers like Hemingway, Cheever and Berryman. I keep trying to read it when drunk/on my way back from dinners/nights out which makes for strange reading and reflection. Good though.
Frank O’Hara’s intimate, detailed poem, “Having a Coke With You”. I seem to love watching videos of poets reading their work aloud, not sure why, but maybe it’s just because there’s something personal and deeply immediate about hearing the words they wrote slowly and privately coming straight from their mouths.