Happy New Year to all my friends and followers,

2020 was a hard year but I still managed to get a CD out so I feel there was some artistic and creative success at the very least.  Where We’re Standing Now is available on CD and digitally from my Bandcamp page along with most of my other solo and collaborative albums, and sheet music.  Thanks to those of you who have purchased and also to those of you have sent me mail to tell me you have been enjoying it.  It’s a strange notion to do a music video or think of any individual tracks as a single on an album of instrumentals but I did just that with Letting Go – Alan Rogers and I had fun early in the morning last August  making the video while driving the streets of south county Dublin.  The video is at the link above.

Despite the pandemic, we were able to get 7 more Paul Simon Project videos up during 2020 thanks to one lovely session in January and a great team effort to put a video together of a group of us performing Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover from our own living rooms in the later half of the year.  I hope to make more videos in this way yet in 2021 – hopefully we can make it happen.

I have started a new project with Rev. Mark Hutchinson, a Unitarian minister and poet based in the Cotswolds in England.  He writes reflections and meditations and I improvise piano backdrops while he is reciting them.  At the moment, we record these using zoom (with slightly better microphones in our individual rooms), I sync up the sound, and Mark creates videos using us and other visuals in England.  They go up roughly once every two weeks, usually on a Friday.  We call it MindTravels.  Look out for us on Facebook and YouTube.

I started recording a new album of songs in the middle of 2019, around the time the Moon Landing EP came out.  This was delayed for much of 2020 but was in fact within spitting distance of being finished so there are only a few tracking sessions before we will mix.  I’m in no hurry to put it out before I can figure out how to promote it properly in this very new world and musical working environment we now find ourselves in.  But it’s sitting there on the horizon and a time will present itself.  The working title is Alternative Arrangements and I’ve collaborated on 10 songs with collaborators from four countries as well as singing two songs by Ronan Swift and Malachi Smyth.   I can’t preview anything yet but I’m really pleased with how it’s sounding at this early stage.  Can’t wait.

Stay safe, stay warm, stay positive, stay healthy, stay at home as often as you can.  This too will pass.

Best wishes,

 

 

 

Josh