I’m between night- shifts and I woke up too early so I’m good-for-nothing. Also, there’s been too much emotions and too much said on here lately. So let’s cool it down with a nice bit of anodyne ballet music.

This is my last tune for a week. Mike Campbell is going to be taking over the site for the next seven days while I’m on holiday. I’m looking forward to seeing what he comes up with. Good luck Mike!

This track is an interlude, suitable for a scene change.

There is this image in my mind, it’s very clear although I don’t know where it came from. A room with a wooden floor and rugs with a low window at one end. It’s a basement flat and there’s a woman and a child sitting on the floor. The child is playing with a puzzle and the woman is looking out of the window at the legs of people walking past. She looks tired.

I was out all day today, what with on thing and another, and on a giant drinking binge this evening. So this is short and imprecise. Can you tell the difference between a Bosendorfer and a Steinway?

I went down into the bowels of Bush House, hoping to play something on a rather lovely Steinway grand that’s down there, but the studio was full of African actors doing a drama. So I had to use a serviceable but school-ish upright in a different studio. It’s hissy because I recorded it on the built in microphone of a little Marantz solid-state recorder.

A piece of sad music dedicated to dead pets (not just mine, everybody’s).

I’m reading The Memory Keeper’s Daughter at the moment and got to this line just before I turned out the light last night:

Don’t breathe, she thought. Don’t move. But there was no stopping anything. Outside, rain fell softly and seeds stirred in the dark wet earth. 

So this morning I was lying in bed thinking about those moments. Then when I was recording this it was raining outside so I stuck the microphone out of the window.

Here’s a little experiment. I was writing something sad on the piano but then the little tune I had thought of was driven from my head by a daughter playing the Tweenies very loud in her bedroom. So when I went to play the piano again everything I was feeling all came out in an incoherent rant which expresses, to me, exactly my state of mind but which is so personal that I suspect will say nothing to anyone else.

I only had a few moments to do this so I sat down at the piano and tried to do the most simple thing I could.

Grey day. I wrote a song about how bad I am at being sorry, but it just seemed too naff for words. Maybe it’s because the house is full of painfully hip twentysomethings at the moment. But there it was, the song obviously wanted to be today’s tune so I just played it on the piano and didn’t sing while I was doing it. Everyone has regrets so I’m sure you won’t have any problems making up your own words.