So, in keeping with current buzz-concepts like Slow Travel, and Slow Food, I've realised I am engaged in a process of Slow Recording. Or in other words, I am not much further on with this record than the last time I spoke to you, and so still have nothing much in the way of news to offer.
Still, my blogs aren't wasted - after the last one, where I raved about the forthcoming Unbending Trees record, I got a message from Kristof Unbending-Tree asking me if I would like to be on the very same album, which apparently wasn't totally finished after all, but instead had a small, Thorn-sized gap on it, waiting to be filled. I have done my best, and now we wait to see if the result meets with the approval of the Record Company (Ben!).
If he asks me to sing it again, or bring the chorus in soooner, I will chuck him.

In the absence of any new music of my own to offer to you, let's just carry on chatting about other people's shall we? Having said I was waiting for an album to love, I've been making an effort to listen to some records that the papers have been telling me I would, or should, love.
First, the Vampire Weekend album. I heard this a while ago, and loved Mansard Roof, and then went to see them play live in Berlin, and kind of liked it but was a bit suspicious of the jumpers round the shoulders, and general preppiness, and, well, peppiness. Couldn't quite get the cheerfulness of it all. Then I put it on again this week and haven't really taken it off. Its sunny outside, and sometimes even i can get a bit joyful (hah!).
I like the MGMT record too, not all of it, but Time to Pretend is prob my fave single so far this year. Yeah! Let's make some music, make some money, find some models for wives!
And today I've been diligently listening to the Fleet Foxes record. Well, I say diligently, like its a chore or something, but it is the absolute opposite. Choral poptastic ear candy is what it is. A vocal sound reminiscent of Neil Young singing in a barn. The song Quiet Houses is like a bizarre kind of Smiths song performed by the Beach Boys.
Last but not least, I have just in the last few hours got my hands on the new Joan as Policewoman record. And pretty rich and strange it is too. Orchestrated and oblique, it's growing with each listen. Sometimes it settle and grooves, then it goes off at funny tangents, and bits of it make you cry.
Changing the subject - the other thing I've been doing the last week or two, is researching my family tree history. Spending hours online, trawling through registers of births, marriages, and deaths, censuses going back to 1841.....it's all fascinating and addictive. And it turns out that my ancestors have all lived in the same small area of Kentish Town for at least the last 150 years. Which, for those non-Londoners of you, might suggest a bucolic, thatched-roofy kind of English village. Those of you who know London will know better, and will smile ruefully at the opposite picture now conjured up in your minds. And will now understand, as do I, why I am so embedded in London, and have always felt at home here, though I wasn't born here, and why I seem to keep writing songs named after tube stations or street maps. It's in my blood, it seems. Ah, breathe in those lovely exhaust fumes, and...relaaaaax......