Break the ice around us...

Playlist

Cloudland Blue Quartet – Riverleaves

Hindemith – Piano Sonatas

Vivaldi – Cello Concertos

Kitty – Break the Ice Around Us

Up very early and a finalised version of “Riverleaves” created...

Shortened tracks, cross-faded with bursts of short wave radio to signify changes...

The lurgi continue but I struggled into town to enjoy a tasty lunch with chums Margaret, Christine, Wendy, Tracey, Paula, Anne and Alan at le P’tite Folie...

Home in good time for an overnight visit from nephew Olly (11) and niece Kitty (8)...

I had just burned a CD of the new LP and was enjoying in the living room as they arrived...

A good night ensued...

A game of “Uno” which, unbeknown to me, has been around for years apparently – it is a variant of the well-known card game, “Switch” but with a  machine which spits out cards at random to penalise players as required...

Olly was interested in hearing some complex piano music and so Glenn Gould’s Hindemith sonatas was presented...

He plays cello and so some Vivaldi cello concertos also made their way on to the sound system...

Upstairs, interest was shown in my CD collection and LPs – the kids did not know what an LP was...

I showed them my original “Billion Dollar Babies”...

...and “School’s Out” albums...

....with their complex covers...

And the Alice Cooper “Old School” box set, like the “School’s Out” album, housed in a desk like cover/box...

They also enjoyed pretending to play a couple of my guitars...

Downstairs again and Kitty asked how to write a song...

So I told her of my often used lyric writing process of opening a book randomly, seeking an interesting sentence and using that as a starting point...

We went back upstairs to get some books and she took a look through the Documenta XII catalogue and opened it at a page featuring a work entitled “A Dance For Those of Us Whose Hearts Have Turned to Ice”...



....a video installation by the Peruvian born Toronto artist Luis Jacob...

Within a half an hour or so, we’d worked out two verses and chorus...

So we headed back upstairs to try out some chord sequences and some singing...

Within 90 minutes of opening the Documenta Catalog, we had a song called “Break the Ice Around Us”...

I quickly put together a backing track and then me, Kitty and Olly recorded vocals while Anne took some photos for posterity...

Some work will need to be done on what we did tonight – my own vocal and my guitar are both distorted through accidental over-recording, while the kids’ vocals are mostly pretty badly out of tune but possibly salvageable – it was the first time they’d ever recorded though I think...

At 10:30, time for bed at the end of a fun productive night...

Highlight of the Day : Writing a song with Kitty...