2020 saw the release of the my solo album Places Beginning with N. Normally with my music, I like to sing, and I like to collaborate with others (particularly with The Cassandra Complex), but in this case I wanted to make an instrumental, ambient album completely written and recorded by just me.
The cover art is me and my dog at Robin Hood’s Bay in Yorkshire, England (yes, I know that is a place that doesn’t begin with N, but I really loved the picture).
While recording the album, as I composed and played I would be thinking of an environment, whether real or imaginary, that I was mentally inhabiting at the time. In the end, these environments became 6 tracks:
- Nuit: inspired by being enfolded into the bosom of the ancient Egyptian goddess of space and the night sky.
- Nagasaki: one of the cities destroyed by nuclear bombs, ending World War II.
- New Town: inspired by Rodney moving to a new town, with all the anticipation and regret that it brings.
- Near to the Heart: an emotional meditation on being both close to, and simultaneously, away from, the things you love.
- Next to Nothing: although this is usually used as an expression of an amount of things (I have next to nothing), I took it as being an expression of being in a place close to Nothingness.
- Never-Never Land: where the Lost Boys live in the Peter Pan books. But in this case, a meditation on being somewhere that can’t exist outside my own psyche.