This is the first time we’ve taken a riff and let it run for three episodes. It certainly hasn’t proved a chore, even if the elasticity of the concept “Home Recordings” has been stretched a bit thin at times.
It was heartening, in a way, to discover Grimes managed to record the whole of her “Visions” album using just Garageband software in her apartment. That’s where I’m at now (actually a whole house), recording and also using Garageband. Me and Grimes, sitting in a tree.
I’ve long harboured the theory that we’re more inspired by other people’s failures though than successes. Yes, Shakespeare may have knocked off King Lear at home during an outbreak of the plague (it sure reads that way). John Bunyan wrote Pilgrim’s Progress in prison. I’ll overlook the most famous prison-penned tome of the last century.
But it’s bad enough to be cooped up for with a disillusioned partner and feral children on a rainy afternoon in a holiday rental, without being “inspired” to believe you can achieve a work of transcendent artistic genius during the endless tetchy weeks self-isolating. Maybe you could if you weren’t persuading Joshua not to stick his fingers in the toaster.
So this episode is dedicated to all of you (it was written in The Time Of The Coronavirus, in case you haven’t caught the allusion). Stay safe, stay well and stay away from each other, for goodness’ sake.
