The reality of Brexit hits today as all those people that have been living in Europe before January 1st will now be illegal as 90 days pass. They will have to leave Europe tomorrow unless they have a resident’s permit. Luckily Olivia and I do have resident’s permits and can stay in Portugal for 5 years. There was an article in the paper recently about a couple who have lived on the Costa Del Sol for a long period, he voted for Brexit and when he applied for residency in Spain he was refused (for who knows what reason). He then said something dumb like “If I knew it was going to be like this, then I wouldn’t have voted for it”, I think a lot of people might feel that way now. I imagine it’s not so straightforward to just apply and expect to stay in a country just because you have lived there for a few years. The same applies to people who have spent the last few years in England who don’t automatically get to stay there either. In our case what was unexpected and is unlikely in applying for residency in other countries is the fact that we were musicians and the fact that we could prove it helped a lot. At the interview, I showed the interviewer photos of my Gold Albums and that convinced her, I didn’t tell her they were all from the 17th century. But the government here encourages artists to move here, I don’t think that’s the case in England unless you’re already a millionaire artist, they want rich people or people with traditional qualifications – not creative people.

It’s late, it’s 12.30 and we have all the windows in the flat open wide. There’s a cool breeze coming in and so far no mosquitos. That will be the only threat, but we’re not that close to the river and the Airbnb that we stayed in when we first arrived was not only close to the river but it was damp and had a leaking roof and the mosquitos were queueing up to come and bite us. I saw families of mosquitos with bags and loungers filing into our apartment. There were mosquitos camping, there were mosquitos that couldn’t get in sleeping in their cars outside, there were young mosquito holiday campers, there were trainee soldier mosquitos, there were mosquito blood ice cream trucks, blood hot dogs, and blood pizza trucks. We were the feast and the whole neighbourhood knew it.

I had two sessions today, one with Noelle in Montreal and another with Chris in New Jersey, both of whom successfully use digital recording equipment. So I should be able to get it working too, right? Haha. Noelle told me that it’s much easier than you think to do some basic recording as did my ex-All About Eve bandmate Andy C. when we spoke recently. So next Thursday, yeah, I have to wait a week to get a whole day booked exclusively for this but now I have blocked out the whole day for nothing other than the Logic Pro tutorial. I do hope to get a little way into it before then too, but with seshes and everything else time escapes me – can someone please sleep for me?

Time to practice your Spanish, I did an interview with Diego Centurión in Argentina for Revista The 13th magazine (see page 64). These are the people that keep your music alive and we are most grateful.

Music today came from an urge to hear some Dylan, hear those tunes, that voice, and those poetic lyrics. I was talking to someone the other day about Blood On The Tracks (1975). It’s one of the great Dylan albums but apparently, it wasn’t seen that way when it originally came out. It’s hard to imagine what it was being compared to for it not to be recognised. That I suppose is always the problem, records are reviewed not in their own right but through the contemporary music of the day, history, and previous albums by the artists. It’s what makes being an artist so difficult, being judged on someone else’s perception, value system and expectation.

Music Of The Daze