posted Sunday, October 04, 2020

The last song on LOST STARS is the title song, Lost stars. You can download it now.

So, here we are... the last one. I'll add some bonus tracks to Bandcamp over the next few weeks, probably carry on doing that for a while... but Lost Stars is finished.

I wrote this in the first few days of lockdown, back in March.  I was re-reading a couple of favourite books and sat down with Carl Sagan one night. I got a couple of chapters into Demon-Haunted World and found myself contrasting his almost telepathic way of understanding and then explaining things against the politicians and medical people trying to do the same thing with COVID.  I thought, we could really use this guy now.  Was he our best communicator, ever?  I think so.  Sorely missed.  In Demon-Haunted World he seems to almost predict the world we live in now.  God knows what he would have made of social media, or the rubbish people seem willing to believe sometimes.  Or believe in, even.  I feel sure if he'd lived longer he'd have tried to do something about it, in his gentle, humanist way.  Our loss.

My friends, thanks for sticking with me on this journey.  I've never released music this way before, it feels like it's been much more of a conversation. People have written me from all over the place, New Zealand, Oz, both coasts of America, France, the UK and some islands in the middle of nowhere.  I've had emails from some of the places in the songs, and lots from people who know them.  People at home, in lockdown, in quarantine... or just living.  Thanks again, keep writing and stay strong.

Till next time

x

posted Tuesday, September 29, 2020

In San Francisco, if you're prepared to walk a couple blocks east from where the tourists take their photos from the highest point of the cable car, you'll come to the end of Vallejo Street.  You'll have to hunt for it, but there's a small plaque there in Russian and English, at the site of seven Russian graves discovered by 49ers.  The plaque says they died in the 1840s, but no one really knows. It's round the corner from the OA house, if you have any idea what I'm talking about....

When I was a kid, I used to read whatever books I could get my hands on about the Northwest Passage and the north Pacific.  Kamchatka, Bering, the sealers, all that stuff.  Stayed with me; the house is still full of them.  I'm fascinated by what these guys did.  That some of them ended up on a hill in San Francisco is unreal. 

I wrote a version of this song a few years ago, actually gigged it a couple of times when I had the pleasure of playing with Chris Penman up north; reworked it in lockdown.   I wrote a new tune for it, and rewrote most of the lyrics as three letters home (to Voronezh, on the other side of Russia).  I knew this song would be on Lost Stars; SF is one my favourite places in the world, who knows when I'll see it again.  I've been looking forward to recording the song, it's always been one of my favourite things I've written, in all its various incarnations.  I knew I wanted to do it last, every time I played it in the workup, I could hear what the guitar wanted to do.  No use me sayin' different.  So yeah, I saved for the end

.... which means we're done.  Lost Stars is about finished.  The last song is the... eponymous title song.  It'll be along shortly, mixing it now.  Still a few bonus tracks, they'll appear over the next few days.  Stay tuned

posted Monday, September 14, 2020

The newest song on LOST STARS is called After Louis. You can download it now. In 1878, Robert Louis Stevenson went into the Cévennes mountains in southern France, struggling through the mountains on foot and camping wild with only a donkey to carry his gear. RLS was sick most of his life, so it must have been very tough. He described the journey in Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. A beautiful book - he's one of my favourite writers.

In 2018, I followed his route through the Cévennes by mountain bike, on a mixture of hiking trails and roads. It's a magical place, wild, sparsely populated, barren on the hills, lush in the gorges. Hot, thundery. Apart from the towns on the main roads (like Florac) the settlements are mostly tiny and very old; it must have looked very like it did when he was there. Given his health, some of the climbs I can't believe he made.

RLS's writing was so evocative, and absorbing, I wanted to try and at least hint at it in the song. I also used, at the end, a few lines from his own Requiem. He wrote this long before he died in Samoa, but it seems he knew the writing was on the wall. He was 44.

posted Wednesday, August 19, 2020

A long time ago, I read the story of Donald Crowhurst, an English inventor who entered the round the world yacht race in 1968 despite never having sailed before. The boat he built was years ahead of its time, but it started falling apart in the Atlantic and he knew that going on to the Southern Ocean would mean certain death. He ended up hiding in a river in South America, making repairs and radioing in false positions that made it look like he was going around the world while other sailors, who had actually sailed round the world, eventually limped home or were rescued. As they dropped out, the positions he radioed in meant he was in the lead and he knew he would be found out. He never came home. His boat was found adrift 9 months after setting off. He wasn't on board, but left enough writings behind to show what really happened. Enough of them have been published that you can see a man... breaking down, caught between madness, humiliation and death.

I really enjoyed putting this one down. It's based on some older ideas and a few false starts. Sometimes, in a musical squeeze, only a Les Paul will do.

posted Monday, June 22, 2020

As promised, as well as the new songs, Lost Stars will have some curiosities and re-mastered old gems, a thank you to all you folks who decided to pay a few dollars for the album even though you didn't have to.  The first of these is an alternate version of Painted Princess from The California Tapes.

Painted Princess is one of my favourite songs on Tapes.  It's also one of the oldest; I wrote it in 2009 after visiting Painted Cave in Santa Barbara.  The song became a part two to Jesusita.  This version of it was almost finished when we put it aside a year ago and worked up a different take based around a tune I'd written on the Spanish (that's what you hear on the California Tapes at the end of the song).  Most of this version was recorded in February 2019, with some guitar added during lockdown while I found out what all the buttons do on the Vox, and some bass added... yesterday. 

This is a bonus track, so if you've already bought Lost Stars you should see it pop up when you go back to Bandcamp.  Here's a link: bobmcneill.bandcamp.com

posted Tuesday, June 16, 2020

The newest song on LOST STARS is Carpinteria.  I've been working on this song for a long time; had the basic tune and most of the words last year and it was going to go on The California Tapes, but it didn't have the same feel as the other songs.  I've tried numerous times to get it to work on the Spanish; it started out much slower and sounded like the love theme from a low budget Western TV movie. 

Carpinteria is on the California coast south of Santa Barbara, right under the Santa Ynez.  The Spanish called it that because when they arrived the Chumash were building canoes.  It's also the only place I've ever been that has naturally occurring asphalt.  Very good for making boats not sink, apparently.

The geography of the song is a bit messed up because it's based on a real story somebody told me.  Yep, they really did do that trip...

posted Saturday, April 25, 2020

Last year, amazing as it seems, I got two albums out of new music, one with Project Feijoa and one with Gillian.  Haven't managed to gig either of them in NZ yet for obvious reasons, but in October and November last year Gillian and I went off to Celtic Colours in Nova Scotia and then down to New England to play.  We put down about 20 shows and finished up on the Oregon coast.  The west coast of America is a place I already knew and loved, and the northeast ... what a spot.  Unbelievable scenery, lovely people, great food and coffee everywhere.  People up there really love their music too. 

All the way through the US, I was writing stuff, scribbling away wherever I had a minute.  Which is quite often actually, a lot of touring is hurry up and wait.  All this stuff went in the pot with a few older ideas I'd been carrying when I got back to NZ at the end of the year and after a few weeks at Gas Mark 5, the songs started to come out.  It turned into Lost Stars, an album about places, the skies above them, the people below, and wondering when we'll see them again.  

The songs are free - download away.  One will pop up here every so often on the music page, and I'll put the words up on the lyrics page.  There'll be 11 or 12 songs, at last count.   Anyone wanting to pay a few dollars for the album is most welcome, you'll get the tracks as they come out, plus some bonus stuff, a few re-mixed tracks from the early days with new vocals.  As the songs go up I'll post something about them here. 

posted Friday, April 24, 2020

The situation is grim.  All our gigs are cancelled.  Craft beer bars are closed.  We must make our own coffee.  I'm gagging for a good Malaysian curry.  To all those people who went through the  supermarkets and cleaned out all the dairy products and toilet paper, have you sorted out cause and effect yet?.  The ponderous, mundane bollocks that many of us have to endure during the day in our offices - what the late, great, Iain Banks called the boring, stupid nonsense of our modern world - so we can indulge our real passion of music, has now invaded our houses, and we call it Working From Home.  We've seen, on YouTube, many of our erstwhile musical heroes attempting to entertain us with at-home DIY concerts, many of which have been surprisingly terrible.  And considering what they're probably worth, a lot of their front rooms are rubbish too. 

None of this matters.  We'll get through. 

Too all those working to keep us safe, fed, and in some cases, alive;  you're all heroes, no doubt about it.  My hat's off to you

posted Thursday, January 23, 2020

Criú (well, most of us, anyway) will be at The Hop Garden in Wellington this Saturday night as part of the Burns night show. 

There's going to be Haggis unfortunately, and somebody with a thick accent will doubtless be shouting at it first, but that's beside the point.  You can get the whole deal including Cullen Skink for $18 (you pay them).  'Food' at 7pm, music from 8pm.  Tickets from the venue (www.thehopgarden.co.nz) or on the door. 

Hope to see some of you there!

posted Wednesday, September 04, 2019

The California Tapes is available now on all major download & streaming platforms, including:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/79qb1RFqXg3GmohQ78N3xd
iTunes / Apple Music: https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/1475331291
CD Baby: https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/projectfeijoa
Bandcamp: https://projectfeijoa.bandcamp.com

posted Saturday, August 03, 2019

At the end of 2018 - during a lull in recording, while Emily was changing dresses, Rob was summoning the tardis and Bob was learning the next 8 bars of the solo - Project Feijoa put a small satellite into orbit around Neptune (it's in preparation for a trip we are thinking about). Today, we released The California Tapes to streaming.  This is the most complicated thing we've done since. 

The California Tapes will be released on 1 September 2019.  It's on all streaming platforms.  iTunes pre-release is 14 August.  Hallelujah

posted Thursday, July 18, 2019

Gillian and I have been working not very hard on our debut album for an awfully long time, and awfully hard for not a very long time.  She tells me we're going to finish it, it's going to be great, and it's going to be called Race for the Sun. It's going to feature four songs, three which I've enscribed especially for the occasion, and one by a young, up-and-coming-songwriter from these parts, one Andrew London.  It's called Emily Bay and it's a belter, folks.  We're gonna try and not mess it up.  You won't have heard of Andrew; he's new and has no profile around the Wellington area.  Natty dresser, though. 

We may or may not just get this puppy out in time for our tour of Nova Scotia and New England in October & November this year (we're also playing in Oregon). I've heard of Nova Scotia; it's bloody miles away, and Gillian tells me it's warm and extremely modern. 

This is amazing.  Not having had my name on a recording for nine years, shortly two of the buggers could be finished.  Mixed blessing; all those recordings I've not had my name on have sold like hotcakes. 

posted Wednesday, July 17, 2019

OK, so I suck at updates. But I'm still alive.  And tonight, however incredible it seems, we finished the last of the masters for the new Project Feijoa album, The California Tapes.  I wrote the first of the songs (Jesusita) in California on a Greyhound bus on 17 September 2009 (I keep meticulous notes), so if we take a month to get the thing onto streaming, it'll be exactly a ten year project.  Of course, I haven't been fully committed to it for every day in between.  Other things have at times seemed important; just not recently, when I began wondering where the years beginning 201.. had gone. 

Oddly, as it became (quite recently) apparent that Tapes might actually be finishable, I've often found myself thinking back to the Scottish summer of 1995, when (- wait: I just used Scottish and summer in the same sentence; let me backtrack.  Between about April and September 1995, I finished and wrote up a PhD, which is to say, I spent those months actually doing it, as opposed to climbing and playing music in the Scottish Highlands and occasionally getting absurdly drunk at pointless conferences in appalling concrete-and-brick eyesores in various parts of England, which is what I'd previously been led to believe a PhD at a Scottish University actually consisted of). 

Yeah, anyway.  Did I put all those brackets and full stops in the right places?  My point... yes.  I haven't worked as hard on anything since 1995, so I hope you like it.  If you do, most of the credit is due to Emily and Rob; but buy it for God sakes, because the royalties are due to me. 

posted Friday, July 12, 2019

I just heard something incredible.  From the horse's mouth, as it were.  Mark Knopfler is apparently giving up touring.  Something to do with being old or something.  Marky!  Nooooooooo

Go watch any of the recent vids posted from the '19 tour and tell me this is a man who needs to hang it up.  If you ask me, he's goin back SOUTH on some of those old songs. 

Seriously, this is a man who's been showing us all what it's about for 40 years - the art of the picture-in-a-song and how to use the guitar when you're painting that picture.  Ain't but maybe 5 other guys who've ever been able to do it. 

Mark, stop this nonsense.  You got it more than ever dude

posted Sunday, March 24, 2019

OK, so you might think that I was bound to think this show was great, being a huge fan of John Mayer.  But no, actually, I was terrified it might not be great.  He's one of my favourite songwriters and one of my favourite guitar players and I knew what I wanted out of this.  He's also done stuff I don't love, he plays blues which I don't love, and at big concerts like this you just never know what you're gonna get. Even big, big talents  can get drawn into the twaddle of modern R&B pop - that sort of warbly pastiche that's on top of everything - and John has skirted around the edge of it.  Tastefully, that's the point; he knows just where to stop.  Or so it seems from his records.  But I'd never seen him live. 

So what did we get?  We got... the lost art of rock music.  For two stunning sets.  Terrific songs, great band (actually if anything too many cooks in the guitar department, you don't fly to Auckland to a John Mayer gig to hear somebody else play guitar), but more to the point, John Mayer in the front.  He's the whole package, this guy.  And rock music?  Not dead, thank God.  On the strength of this, he might be saving it all by himself.