I suppose getting up earlyish after a gig isn’t so bad when the gig is in your own house. So the sesh with Arktik Lake Tony in Sydney wasn’t exactly a strain after a sleepless night with a crushing hangover. But those days are gone anyway, the drinking went years ago and the smoking years before that and what one considers pleasure changes as one gets older and so after Tony, Olivia and I went for a pleasant walk in the recently reopened park. We hadn’t been there before, it’s always been closed due to the lockdown but today it was open. Inside there were people on every bench enjoying the southern European sun but in reality, it was a little chilly if you weren’t sitting in direct sunlight. The park was lovely, birds twittering away, kids playing, young people and old people enjoying the day. But then as we see the Portuguese infection numbers shrinking, I’m reading that the French and Italian numbers are rising with new lockdowns in force, Belgium and Germany considering the same. Please not again!

After the park, it was psychedelic supermarket time but on the way, I decided to call Anekdoten Nicklas as I was meeting Olivia down in the shop. Looks like the Canadian gig in Montreal in May is off. It seems like we should just think about 2022 as the chance to play live again with last year as recording records time and this year as releasing them time. All this staying in certainly focuses your creative mind and if you ever needed an excuse to write a song, learn a language, write a poem, learn the piano, draw, paint or get into yoga, then this is it. Sadly, it’s also given rise to mental problems and people going nuts, I guess people need different things.

Sesh with Gavin at 5 PM somewhere over there on the northwest coast, the time change in America had the times messed up, it always does however hard you try. There’s talk of abolishing it but I like it, not just that extra hour of daylight in the summer but the fact that something changes at all. It’s funny, some people want to hold onto traditions and others break them. If we stuck strictly to the rules of tradition there would be no weird music but also if weird music was the norm you’d be desperate for the traditional because weird would be traditional and traditional would be weird – haha, it’s why hippies sometimes have accountants as children, it’s the ultimate rebellion for them.

A sesh with Jed after Gavin that had us working on our 8th song for Space Summit 2 when Space Summit 1 isn’t out yet. Tracks from Jerome are on my desktop but I won’t have time to listen fully concentrated for a couple of days. I have to help my friend Jan with a translation of a film presentation from Swedish into English for his wife who is a director and they need it by Tuesday. Plus I have five seshes Monday/Tuesday and I also have to decide what to do about the damaged keyboard. Grrrr…

Talking of damage, I have some kind of reoccurring rash on the back of my hands which might be Dyshidrosis, a stress rash, although it doesn’t look anywhere near as bad as the pictures, I guess there’s mild stress and heavy stress. I guess I’m just busy, rather than stressed. I get stressed when I’m relaxing, I immediately think I could be doing something, never really considering that relaxing is doing something. I had another eye thing today and that’s probably the same cause. It’s why I watch football, it makes me just sit there and do nothing else because if you look away – they score. Watching Deep Space 9 over dinner is supposed to be relaxing too but the Ferengi just stress me out, especially The Grand Nagus. They make it more like a puppet show than a journey into the imagination.

Music today has been my latest discovery Odetta Hartman and her two albums Old Rockhounds Never Die (2015) and 222 (2018). It’s some kind of country, raw, sometimes psychedelic, other times weird and she must be due for another album soon. There’s no Wikipedia page for her.

Earlier, I played Robin Trower’s third album For Earth Below (1975) and The Stones’ Beggars Banquet (1968), both great in different ways. After that, it was Valerie June’s new album, The Moon And Stars, Prescriptions For Dreamers (2021). This from the Rough Trade site:

Conjuring a next-generation fusion of folk, soul, gospel, country and transcendental blues, The Moon and Stars, Prescriptions For Dreamers, Valerie June’s third full-length album for Fantasy Records is a deeply affecting work of genuine beauty and unassuming wonder.

I saw her live once in Stockholm, a smallish but packed house. I bought her first album, Pushin’ Against A Stone (2013). The album between these two, The Order Of Time (2017), I somehow missed. She has a unique voice and is quite a personality, great if you like this kind of thing.

Music Of The Daze