February | 2025 | Gray Summers

Suddenly there’s a sense of why

The sun don’t shimmer shine on to

All the free time in your life

Spent with music.

Days?

They become a cloudy daze of

Trying to create dreams.

You exist by

Putting in the effort

To succeed.

Are efforts born in reality

Or does the reality exist in

Difficult pathways.

Aims?

Untouchable

Unreachable

A haze.

Ergo. You sometimes place yourself under a false illusion that you’re a different person to your own actual reality. Or more apt, what you think you can actually achieve with the skills you own……becomes like catching smoke.

Over years on years playing a bit of acoustic guitar is a simple basic skill that allows songwriting to still exist in life. Definitely not the multi-instrumental inclusions needed for the ambition of a full song’s conclusion. The bass guitar, having not been played since the year of 1982, is amazing to have been reintroduced to in October 2023. Currently recording the songs is therefore a struggle. This previous reality here is simple enough for the penny to drop.

What also exists as the true reality when writing songs, and then to record them, is that you also need a muse or others to inspire and assist at times. The times when push comes to shove and you want to realise a desired end result.

When Paul McCartney split from the Beatles, he had his London home studio. He recorded his first album in secrecy by playing all the instruments. Paul is a genius. Alongside. He had Linda providing backing vocals. And I should imagine, precious drive. And she had self inspiration too because of joining Wings on vocals and keyboards. Subsequently he then had Wings to really allow other musicians to do their thing. The other Beatles all had others contributing too on solo excursions. Other musicians to bounce off with the development of the solo songs.

It gets very difficult to inspire yourself in attempting to ‘do it all’. You have songs, and dreams to how you hope they sound once recorded. They are whizzing around your head. But outside headspace, in the arena of reality, you haven’t the talents at your fingertips to get the sounds that exist in that mind-scape to commit to the needed reality when attempting to play the instruments.

PROGRESSION #4. NO VOCALS YET. A BIT OF ELECTRIC SKIFFLE GUITAR. STRUMMED ACOUSTIC LINGERING IN THE BACKGROUND TOO. THROWING EVERYTHING AT ‘AN EXPERIMENT’. NO MIX LEVELS AT ALL.

When listening to Paul’s playing of instruments outside his gifted piano and bass playing, there exists an amazing synergy of sound. I have gotten inspiration from Roy Wood too on his playing of all the instruments on his two solo albums Boulders and Mustard. But I’m not as proficient or even close to either.

I have been experimenting naively with instrumentals too. David Bowie’s album ‘Low’, on a recent read of how it progressed, is a fascinating album too. Mixing both vocals on songs alongside instrumentals. When I first heard it back in the 1970s I was really taken aback at its beauty. I gave it another few back to back listens a couple of weeks ago. Hunted down background story on the making of the album I found this link below.

http://www.bowiegoldenyears.com/low.html

Over the weeks ahead it will be an interesting progression of thoughts now.

First question? What next? Putting the feelers out I suppose. Begin a new approach to finding collaborators.

Second thought is probably actually not finding anyone and biting the bullet in continuing to keep experimenting in the hope a song may be decent enough to truly be happy with. And find a unique Frail Autumn sound.

Third question and thought is to change the whole concept of each song and bring them back to minimalistic basics. An acoustic guitar, little manageable chord flick inclusions on electric guitar, bass guitar, vocal/harmonies and maybe percussion drumming in simplicity rhythms. Which then involves rewriting the vibe totally.