poppedmusic

“America has a romance that nowhere else on Earth does. We all have a Hollywood-ized picture of America that we have learnt from films and music, and when making the move to live in the US, this image was all I could think about. When I arrived, I started to notice small things that would remind me of this movie scene perception I had. This way of seeing America led to there being more to write about, and more vivid imagery that stuck with me. At the same time as I was gathering inspiration from the feel of places, the people around me at Berklee would be into all sorts of music that I had never heard of before, genres I never would have listened to before, and this added a whole new language into my writing and playing.

Being surrounded by thousands of musicians, you quickly learn that you are one of many trying to achieve a shared goal and you are taken out of a mindset of being self-centred and adopt a desire to work with the completion. This created a huge shift in my songwriting as I started to stop writing songs about myself and start writing about other people I had met along the way. This was a period where I was developing a lot musically and as person and that’s kind of what 7×7 is about – its about noticing a symmetry from passages I had read in the Bardo Thodol and what I was learning about myself. 7×7 was written in Spain, as I was in Valencia for a few months and I would be in the studio until 1/2am every night and the transport had stopped so I’d walk back to where I was staying, through these empty streets and all these lyrics would flood to me, and 7×7 happened of those nights. That’s the funny thing about songwriting, that ideas always come to you in the most inconvenient places, where you just want to pick up a guitar and work them out but can’t. The B-Side of the 7×7 single is a song called the Director’s Daughter. I got back to London for the first time in a while and I had booked myself an hour in a sensory deprivation tank to see what it was like. I travelled far south of London and it was a terrible day outside, but I got there and went in the tank. This salty water started to hurt my eyes and I was struggling to handle the pain without getting out and it was then that these lyrics for the Director’s Daughter came to me, all at once. And I just had to keep repeating them to myself for the hour, so that when I got out I could write them down.”