In the studio today using all those guitars in yesterday’s picture and more. I used ten different instruments on sessioneer Craig’s track, mostly today and a little yesterday.

Seven hours in the studio and the last day of projects before we move to Portugal. A lot of new chapters as the MOAT Poison Stream campaign through Indiegogo comes to an end on December 6th (Thanks to everyone who contributed in a small surge yesterday and all the early birds too). The three latest sessioneer projects we have been working on are done for now for me in as much as I will be only ears and opinions from here on as Dare will be mixing. Ahad, Arctic Lake and Craig, phew that was really something! Space Summit and Jed too although that one is finished sonically. What a few months of projects it has been. It’s exciting to be involved in so many different projects including my own MOAT project and by the way, if you preorder now you’ll have a digital WAV copy at midnight on December 6th GMT.

The MOAT – Poison Stream Campaign

As we are moving we have started to look around at the archive and the studio at all the things that need doing – locking away guitars, storing amps against dry walls, filing records away, making space for Dare and Aram who looks after everything when we are gone, including listening to records and emptying the dehumidifiers, both important jobs.

It looks like we may already have found a place to live. We’ve talked to the landlord João and his friend Adélia and they seem really nice. A nice spacious apartment at an affordable price (we hope). So we have found a reasonably priced Airbnb for 18€ a day for a week to settle in and view this apartment at least and then we hope to move in. What could go wrong? Haha.

The other day I was in the greengrocers and there were two ladies speaking a foreign language through their masks, it was quite hard to distinguish what it was. So I asked them and guess what, it was Portuguese. It was a mother and daughter from Lisbon. The daughter has a café in the main street of Penzance. When they said they were from Portugal I said: “Wow, we’re moving there next week”. We talked about Fado, the older lady told me that Ana Moura was the one. I told her I had seen Mariza live at the Sydney Opera House and she said: “Yes, she’s a good singer, BUT…”. So I’ll be researching Ana Moura and maybe we’ll get a chance to see her live in the future.

A big sessioneer day tomorrow, Ava in Minneapolis, Craig in Atlanta, Hans in Seattle and Noel in Surrey here in England. We have to get to the station to secure our train tickets, to the post office to send off MOAT records, Handwritten & Illustrated Lyrics, prints and Mystery Boxes. Postcards can wait till Porto because it seems exotic. The days move on so fast, will we manage another trip to the supermarket on the beach? One of the great things about Porto is that it is also near the sea so we’ll be able to get that fresh sea air into our lungs. Portugal has some of the biggest waves in the world and I’m looking forward to travelling inside Portugal when we have settled in a bit. A whole new country to explore, not just Porto but Braga, Coimbra, Lisbon, The Algarve. Also, I wonder, does Portugal have Progressive Rock?

French was sooo hard today. I got stuck on two sentences where I was having difficulty understanding how the form worked and how there are different ways of saying the same thing. I suppose if it was easy everyone would be multi-lingual. One wonders at what point will I be able to engage in a proper French conversation? It’s eight hours to France from Porto. Then there’s the issue of a German wife and father-in-law, a Swedish daughter, granddaughter and mother-in-law, living in Portugal and being an hour from Spain.

I need to be alive for another 100 years.

Music today has been, you guessed it, Frank Sinatra’s September Of My Years, a whole album of songs about getting older. He made this album when he was 50, just a spring soya chicken.

Music Of The Daze