In The Bleak Midwinter

In the last few days I worked on my very first recoding of a Holiday song – a traditional Christmas carol. “In The Bleak Midwinter” has always been one of my favorite melodies – the music for this well known version of the song was written by Gustav Holst, the lyrics are by Christina Rossetti.

To me it’s one of the very few songs associated with the Christmas season than can also be listened to at other times of the year without having an awkward feel to it. The story of course is related to the birth of Jesus, but unlike in most other Christmas carols and newer Holiday songs there are no references to the usual setting of these songs – no jingle bells, no gathering around the Christmas tree etc.

There are some very powerful, rather dark images in this song – “The earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone”. There’s something archaic to it, I think. And I like the idea of angels.

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This is the very first recording I ever made without the aid of at least one or two synthesizer tracks. It’s just my voice and my guitar (two guitar tracks – one with the simple chord accompaniment and one that consists of free improvisation, which was done in order to add some texture and flow to the recording).

I got some new equipment recently and I’m still in the process of getting used to it. I bought a really nice microphone a while ago and I tried out some new amplifiers and headphones -most of this stuff is much better than the equipment that I had been working with for almost a decade or so.

The advantage of the old stuff was that I had gotten used to it – I knew how my voice sounded on its way through the old mic, amplifier and headphones. With the new equipment it’s a totally different sound and as a singer you inevitably feel a bit lost and insecure when your listening experience during recording changes so drastically. You have to be familiar with the sound that comes out of your mouth.

So, I think on this recording my voice sounds a little more insecure and shaky due to the still new experience of hearing myself so differently during recording, but after all I guess the vocal track I came up with in the end is quite okay – I actually like the fact that there are some rather fragile and some louder passages – I think it makes sense as a whole. My favorite thing about this recording is the dreamy structure of the interwoven guitar parts – I always like that.

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Apart from that I’m working on my album “Whispers” – I just spent an entire month on the mixing of one single song and I’m still not happy with it. So it might take even longer now until I’ll come up with an album that I can live with. I just don’t want to release another horrible sounding bunch of songs.

Well, there’s a lot of work for me to do – but I’m quite relaxed about that now. It feels like I’m only working these days in a certain inner struggle, trying to overcome my own limitations. I’m not thinking of the world right now. I don’t even know if I’ll ever really try to expose my music to the world anymore. The world is so far away.

I wish you all a calm and happy Christmas and a new year without loss and without pain.

-A