The second Space Summit single and title track, Life This Way, is here and also available now on all the relevant streaming sites. See video below. It’s only a few weeks before the CD will be available on September 10th and the limited blue vinyl (only 500 copies) will be available early next year. You can preorder it here and get a full download of the whole album. Thanks to Ryan at Jammerzine for yesterday’s premiere. These songs that we release, we call them singles, but are they really singles? They’re more tasters for the album and consequently, we thought it would be best to release different kinds of songs to show the range of music on the record. Even though we do probably have a sound, it’s not like AC/DC where one track is just about what the whole album will be. But then, here’s an interesting thought: perhaps to AC/DC fans all our tracks sound the same? Maybe when they hear AC/DC songs major fans hear subtleties and differences which simply wash over us. It’s like classical music, if you’re not into it – Mozart, Stravinsky or Dvořák, they might sound the same to you when really they are quite different. I will gamble on the fact that the style gap between Mozart and Stravinsky is substantially different to the songs on AC/DC’s new album.

I didn’t make it to the pool today although that muscle problem had me conscious of where the pain was yesterday but today I was moving around quite freely. So I’ll be back in gym land again tomorrow after another night’s sleep and a final Friday in the pool before they close for August. Although today we took Ariel out and went by the other pool to discover that the two pools are discussing who will be open between them in August. I hope it’s my pool because the other one is a little tricky to get to without a car and as I don’t drive and usually leave to swim before Olivia arises I’ll be spending almost as much time travelling as I will be swimming. After the pool, we decided to go on a short run to check out the beaches on the other side of Gaia which is the town across the river Douro from Porto and really close to where we were.

We wound our way down to the sea through labyrinthine Portuguese streets and when you live in a place like this, in the summer with a light blue campervan, you can’t help but feel you are on holiday. It only starts to feel like something’s up when you find a park across the road from a beautiful long sandy beach on the gorgeous Atlantic Ocean with its crashing waves and sparkling surface and when you walk on the sand there’s hardly anybody there and the ones that are there are certainly not tourists. We walked along the shoreline, Olivia kicked off her shoes and felt the waves and the soft sand between her toes. I collected some small smooth white stones and a shell. A wave got me with my shoes still on but only slightly so I didn’t have that horrible mushy socks, saltwater and sand discomfort.

We sat on a rock and gazed out to sea, transfixed by the waves with the sun slowly sinking towards the horizon. It was quite breezy, too breezy to just lie on the beach without a windbreak but there was some protection by some rocks on the right side, making it more comfortable to just sit and not move for a while. There were lifeguards, flags to swim between and between the road and the sand, some nice bar restaurants, also not full. On one part of this long and large expanse of sand, there were hopeful changing tents, empty, unused with the lack of tourists. On a normal summer’s day in Portugal, I imagine this beach would be packed. Perhaps next year we will get to see how it really is in the place where we live.

Music today was appropriately Cape Verde’s Cesária Évora on my iPod in the van till the battery ran out and now it doesn’t want to charge.

Tonight I was listening to what I thought was the new Steve Howe’s Yes album but it was in fact a mini-LP, From A Page (2019). It’s only four tracks from the 2008/2011 lineup with Benoît David on vocals. Disc Two is live tracks and I think the singer sings just a little bit flat and after hearing I’ve Seen All Good People like this I decided I had to listen to The Yes Album (1971) which was much, much better. Not fair perhaps to listen to an album when the singer has every opportunity to get it right versus live with all the difficult issues to encounter. But having seen the ‘other’ Yes in recent years (and recently disbanded), Jon Anderson sang so beautifully live, I actually couldn’t believe it. I wonder what he thinks when another version of the band breaks away and gets a singer whose main task is to sound like him. Weird. I couldn’t believe the current official Yes singer, Jon Davison is called Jon (XXX-son)!

Music Of The Daze