Album from last year

Death of A No-One - One Man Town by A R McGregor

This is an album I recorded with One Man Town last year. It was a rush getting it done before I left to go to Uni and therefore it is not exactly the fully finished product.  There are a few songs that I'm sure we would have worked on more, and one or two we would have dropped, had we worked on the project longer but I moved away and was too busy to go back to it.  Now, a year later, the others have gone off and started a new band so I decided to just draw a line and let people hear the album if they want, I may take songs from it and use melodies for other things, and I do think it's a good album, just there's a couple of tracks too many perhaps.

The idea was to create a concept album about a mediocre guy's life.  I have no idea why, just kind of came out that way.  Most of the songs merge into one another and there are repetitions of themes etc - mainly to do with the sun.  I wrote all of the songs apart from 'Another Day' that we wrote together as a band.

I am going to keep the One Man Town name and make music myself, I'm slowly taking bits and pieces from my studio in Largs up to Glasgow and am looking forward to a few recording projects I have in the pipeline.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Oblique Strategies for Drama

I am a big fan of the musician Brian Eno. From his work with Roxy Music through to his records with U2 and Coldplay via Bowie, Byrne and inventing ambient music I think he has an interesting outlook on the creative process and has made a career out of reinventing his own sound, and the sound of others. As a theatre director who has a massive interest in record production I was drawn to Eno's Oblique Strategies . A series of prompts written on cards that he would pull out at random to instigate a creative impulse in the musicians he was working with. You can check out some of the strategies on this website .  Sometimes when you are rehearsing a play you can feel that, as a director, you are making the same safe choices again and again. Actors have this feeling too. They have made choices in rehearsal and are scared to deviate from 'what works'. This pushes a whole world of unexplored possibilities to the side.  I was working on some show or other a few years ago and when it ...
Read more

Making Battery Park

Image
Opening night for my latest play, Battery Park, has come and gone. I'm sitting here, exhausted but exhilarated after a fantastic rehearsal process that led to us making what I think is a great show.  I started this blog as a student at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where I studied directing, as a place to reflect on my practice, and over a decade later I haven't kicked the habit. So here's a reflection on my process as a director - but also as the artistic director of Sleeping Warrior Theatre Company.  It will be of niche interest to some I hope, and will be a resource for myself looking back. Battery Park is about a group of young people from Greenock who form a band and attempt to become bigger than Oasis in 1990's Britain. We know right from the off that they didn't succeed and we watch the main protagonist now - a 47 year old man - as he grapples with the choices made by younger him and how they still affect his life.  Around a year and a half ago I appli...
Read more

Keep moving, just keep moving.

Image
In what must surely be the longest move ever recorded by man I think KD and I are finally ready to leave the lovely Largs behind (perhaps for good).  Our new flat in Glasgow is looking lovely and just about everything, apart from the GIANT framed photo of David Bowie, is out of our old house. My bare house... I've almost finished the new One Man Town album, all the songs bar one are in some sort of completion, now it's just extended listening and tweaking until everyone's happy with the final mix.  It's a concept record so all the tracks are inter-linked which is quite fun to try and do.  I've got a good idea for the first video, involves computer games. Also happening just now is the biggest fund-raising event of the year for the Largs Youth Theatre - we run Largs Has Got Talent, which sounds terrible but is actually a lot of fun.  I'm doing the sound for the show and am basically in charge of the running of the actual night (Ryan and Emma do a great j...
Read more