Today I heard from the record company that the latest master of
Small Group Psychosis is good enough for folk music, as we say. Cover art is being produced, liner notes are being worked on, release gigs in Auckland (and Wellington? elsewhere?) are being booked. After seven-and-counting years, it's finally going to happen.
Let me see, where do the songs come from? Given that the last album, Undinal Songs, was completed and released in April 2002... Well, the very oldest is "Awakening", which came into my head fully-formed in 1992, at the piano in my university hostel. "Army of Light" was originally written for Bonsai Jungle in 1999, although it was never completed or performed with that band - it went through about five rewrites before going in the "too hard" basket. I retrieved it and made it work in 2006. The chorus to "Everything They Ever Told You Was Wrong" came from about the same time, although I'm glad I trashed the song it was originally in. The verses were originally written at an Esperanto convention - in Esperanto! - in 2005, performed there, and translated later.
Esperanto conventions are actually quite productive for me - "Girl Without a Past" was written at an Esperanto convention in Melbourne, Australia, in early 2003. Probably "Crowley" came into being at a similar time - the first draft lyrics are in my LiveJournal somewhere.
"a dead thing" (original title "Your Little Girl") dates from 2002 in genesis, making it probably the first post-Undinal song - I remember getting up in the middle of the night to write the lyrics down. It was originally a slow dirge with many more words, so aren't you glad I spiced it up a bit? "No Choice in the Matter" went through a similar process, and probably originally arose at the same time. It was originally going to be a hard-out prog thrasher, kind of like "GwaP", but I tried an "acoustic version" at a gig in 2005 (at The Cake Shop for those who remember), and the fanbase liked it, so we stuck with it.
"Abomination" arose from the protest against the crypto-fascist, homophobic Destiny Church in 2005, and "Yonder Lies the Sea" in the same year. The songs which arose after I moved to Auckland were "Kalla Kalla Amrika" and "For My Sister" in 2006, although the lyrics to the latter were rewritten after the Louise Nicholas police-rape case in 2007. (Musically, I went for a "New Model Army meets Kraftwerk" vibe, and I think it worked.)
The title track went through about four different versions, starting after I'd decided that was going to be the title of the album. The first which came close to being accepted was a tango - would you believe - with "comic" lyrics. How happy I am that that's dead and buried somewhere. It was finally completed in demo form in January 2008, and at that point I knew the album was done.
Well, there you have it. All of these songs have been played live, to varying reactions, and now you get to see how well I can perfect them, given my equipment and resources. I hope that other songs I've written in the last year or two - "Where will you spend eternity?" and "Office Work is Fucking Boring" in particular - will also be published, at some stage, in some form.
See you at the release gig(s).
p.s. Oh, almost forgot - a cover of Leonard Cohen's "Teachers". This was actually one of the first songs I ever played live as a solo act - perhaps even as far back as 2000, at Girls In Space. It was one of the first ever songs The Sisters of Mercy played live, and I decided to evoke the spirits of my musical ancestors at the beginning of my solo-plus-sequencer career. The record company insisted on including it, although I know some of the fanbase don't like it. Sorry, guys.