Day 58
Sunday April 18
Mark:
We have a first rehearsal at the house today, just chucking some songwriting ideas back and forth with the guitar. Getting the musical feeling back really. I also hit the bass with pretty much the same attitude. Just getting back into it. What’s really nice is that I wake up just needing to play so I do.
Then, once we’re up and about, we’re in the garden for the first time since we got back. It really is nice to be outside and relaxed like this, and it’s here, reclining in deckchairs in the sun, that Maja first has the idea of maybe traveling about with a car and a tent. This could be an effective touring strategy – turning up at venues in which we could stay the night after a show, but demonstrating that we’re self sufficient at the same time. We kinda think that in touring, we could also stay at the houses of audience members, but we still like the idea of having a tent handy, kind of in the spirit of, people help people who help themselves. All in all, we’re just putting detail on the bones of how a life of musical touring could be possible.
Day 59
Monday April 19
Maja:
The weather is nice so we go on a walk around the block, making our way to the outdoor coffee shop where we have a nice coffee and chat with the locals. We meet a friend of Mark’s, also called Mark, by the coffee shop and he sits down with us to have a chat. I’m resting my superboot on a chair, so it’s only natural that he sits with us. He tells us about his filming project going on a motorcycle all around the island of England to interview locals, and I misinterpret it as a filming project about him traveling all around Ireland to interview locals. I really think it’s fun that he is looking at traveling to Ireland as well. Mark explains my misunderstanding to me as we walk back home at a super slow pace. He was actually talking about going round the UK, referring to it as The Island.
Well home I’m exhausted. I haven’t been out and about in about a week, and it’s just exhausting so I go to sleep for a while, while Mark gets on with some phone calls. There’s always phone calls to be had. Always. Around 8 ish, we’re awake, hungry and annoyed about not being as productive as we’d like to have been. And we haven’t even played any bass today, or worked on any songs. At all. We eat something small, and I decide that we’ll do a bass session. Mark wants to do some music writing, but we start off with bass. It’s another one hour session entirely on right hand plucking technique. I start to somewhat get a hang on how to pluck more fluently. My plucking technique is now better than it has ever been before, and I am now using the same technique that Mark uses – free strokes. I’ve always used rest strokes before. After finishing a session on bass, we continue to finally get some original music writing done. Mark’s a brilliant songwriter. I’m not sure if that has been clearly written enough in these diaries, but he really knows what he is doing. So finally, after everything we’ve been through these couple of months, after everyone we’ve told about our project, we are finally in a mentally calm enough space to be able to even start to consider writing music. Even if writing music is our top priority, even if it now is our self chosen duty to actually write music, every disturbance that came along just put our heads further and further away from actually writing. We’d prepared a couple of documents with lyrics ideas in advance. So we take a look through our documents and start with the one that is most ready. And here the magic happens. Mark just does, well how to say it, his magic. I’ve never worked with a true professional like this before, and it is clear as day that he knows exactly what he is doing. Line after line just comes out, accompanied by his bass playing. I struggle to sing along and be helpful, it’s quite fun, but compared to him, I have no idea of what I am doing. I got one melodic idea during the session, to do with one of the lines, but he had so many. It’s truly wonderful to be able to work with him. Amazing really. I don’t feel pressed on performing very well in this situation, I know that it’ll come around when I’m more used to it. He has had a lifetime in music, and now he has decided that he wants to invest that in someone like me. I am truly flattered. I know that eventually, I am going to have more to give in the creative aspects, but for now, I’m going with the flow. Watching. Learning. Using what I have to do what I can. For me, it’s like I am a student, working with a colleague that is a star.
Mark:
What can I say? All the above is true. But seriously, sometimes ideas and melodies come, sometimes they don’t. Today they just happen to be exploding in me. But also, Maja really has woken the dormant songwriter in me and it’s so cool to be thinking about original music again. That’s not something I’ve really had an interest in for around seven or eight years, despite, for a long time, songwriting being all I wanted to do. I just hit a point when I realised so many of the impossibilities of songwriting as a profession, not least the fact that I needed so many different people to work with and could never get them all in the room at the same time. So I decided to make it as just being a bass player instead and totally dedicated myself to that and reinventing myself as how I played bass. This was around 2013, and in 2014 I took off on the adventure that would become Mark’s Diaries. Which ended about two months ago as Mark’s Diaries violently collided with Maja’s Diaries and became The Diaries.
Going way way back in time, in almost every band I’ve been in I’ve been the primary songwriter, which included writing about 80 per cent of Drunken Monkees’ album in 2010, the one that saw us take off to Hamburg to try to be rockstars. Going further back, I’ve run songwriter nights, including the legendary regular Tuesday night at Fred Zeppelins in Cork. I can claim absolutely no credit for its legendariness, that kudos all going to Ronan Leanard who ran it before me, couldn’t continue with it for reasons I can’t begin to remember and so handed me the reins. That, for me, felt like the moment I arrived in Cork as a true part of the music establishment of that incredibly musical city. At the time, I was of course a journalist on the Evening Echo, a job I had for four years but even then I had kind of morphed into the paper’s de facto music writer and so was totally immersed in all things musical in the city, both professionally and personally. Call it unprofessional, but as well as reporting on all the original bands of the time, I was also playing in a whole bunch of them, including my own, Fly On The Wall, playing mostly my songs although other members did make their own notable contributions from time to time. A lot of this happened in conjunction with running the songwriter night, for which I felt obliged to lead by example and have at least one new song every week; as host, I played the first two or three song set.
This whole original band thing continued until I had to leave journalism in the illness/fibromyalgia episode that lasted around five years until I had my breakthrough and moved to Madrid. During that five years, I couldn’t see myself doing any conventional work again, and so really put myself into becoming a songwriter trying to have my songs placed with other people. I worked with a producer on this, working from home and my own little studio and sending rough productions of my songs to him regularly, sometimes even at request for a particular artist of particular project. But nothing came of any of them. Then the move to Madrid happened where I tried to keep this thing going but it really just fizzled out. Then, after the whole album thing, I hit a five minute period when it looked like this part of my life might just be making a come back but again that came to nothing and I thought, screw it, just concentrate on being the best bass player you can be and go that way, which led to the Costa Blanca Diary and then directly to London. So there I was. All through London refusing to be involved, as a direct member, in any original project. If someone wanted to pay me for a studio session on their own stuff, great. But live, apart from jam sessions, if it didn’t pay, I didn’t do it. Which meant playing covers, although there was that interlude playing original songs with Dan, but I was also playing in The Insiders with him – our professional cover duo – so I was happy to help him out with original sets from time to time and it was something fun and cool to work on alongside our cover work, indeed we would sometimes do an original set somewhere in London, then run off to do a paid gig somewhere. And there was always the possibility his thing could take off, and we did manage to get some good representation in the form of Hot Vox, so it was really all good. But that was it, as far as I was concerned, until Maja came along.
All this new thinking about songwriting today seems to have opened my mind a little and I remember that I have some Irish running through my family in the shape of one of my uncles. I call him, bring him up to speed with some of our craziness, and ask if he might know anyone in Ireland who could just give us a heads up on houses or anything. He puts me in touch with a friend of his who just happens to live in Donegal. There’s Donegal again. Are we getting some kind of message here? Her name is Sarah and her and her husband moved to Donegal some years ago and she’s happy to give me some bits and pieces about how much she loves the place, but little concrete, so to speak. But it’s great to have made this contact and she says that now she knows we’re looking, and the kind of thing we’re looking for, if she should hear of anything suitable, she’ll let us know. Wonderful.
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