Today begins a new experiment in recording and sharing music. This song, “More”, which you are free to listen to and download above, is the first in a series of twelve songs that I will record and release exclusively on this newsletter in 2025. Some of the songs that appear this year may reappear in future albums released to physical and streaming media, but I want to set this newsletter apart as the place for their original moments in the world.
So, once a month for the rest of the year, you can expect to receive a missive containing three things:
A new song
An original piece of visual art to accompany the song
Some reflections on the song’s intentions, origins, and lyrics.
I’m excited about this project because it gives me a way to dignify further the crucial role this newsletter has been playing in my creative work. I’ve mentioned before how much it means to me to have a small circle of family and friends willing to bear witness to these signposts along the way. Sharing these songs each month (and sharing them to this place exclusively) will be a reminder to myself that these are the kinds of practices that make art possible: friends gathering to support one another and bodies of work collected slowly and steadily over time. By contrast, I feel there is much lacking in dignity about what some online platforms require of their users who are made to compete with one another for attention (which is then measured, converted to data, and sold to advertisers). To be sure, the website that hosts this newsletter is in many ways just another form of social media, but sharing with you all on this place feels so much less like sending something blindly down the river.
Putting the Laptop Away
In the spirit of embracing creative restraints, all twelve of the songs I share this year will be recorded on a Yamaha MT100, a lovely 4-track tape recorder from the 80s. I was recently given this tape recorder by a dear friend. After giving the sliders and knobs a few wiggles and the record head a swipe with some isopropyl alcohol, I was delighted to find that it seems to work very well. I haven’t tried recording music to tape since the early 2000s, and this is going to be a learning experience.
My method for this month’s song included recording all of the vocal and guitar parts to tape, playing them back through an interface to capture them on some recording software, and then giving them a gentle mix and master in the digital environment. Commercial cassette releases have two “sides”. Maybe you remember needing to flip a cassette after the tape runs out to hear its B-side. Interestingly, the stereo tracks of both sides of a tape are recorded side by side on the same length of tape. This is how a 4-track tape recorder works. It uses both “sides” of the tape simultaneously which means that the tape can only be used in one direction. I tried to make use of this feature in “More” by recording electric guitar strums in the intro and outro of the song on the wrong side of the tape, which, when played together with all of the right side materials, creates the reversed swell you can hear as the song begins. I’m really looking forward to experimenting more with this physical medium. I think the song sounds full of character, and the tape has surely left its mark.
Let me know what you think in the comments. Have any of you experimented recording to 4-track recorders?
The Song
This month’s song was born from one of my favourite prayers/slogans/affirmations-of-the-real: “More of what is, please.” It’s an aspirational hyperbole, but one that I try to take seriously. When I am the cause of another’s pain, it is very often because I have tried to hide myself from the reality of the pain that must be my own. But then, when I do bear the pain that is mine, I may discover there is one that bears me—this strange thing called existence. Some listeners might recognize that this song is the spiritual cousin of the new tune I released in November, “Water in my Mind”. Both songs are hymns to “What Is”, and in both the existence that holds all things is present as a mother. For me, “More” is most of all a meditation on the strange fact that in our being born, coming into being, and journeys through life, none of us have really gone anywhere.
There’s a trail you can tread upon
for your entire life
and never get any further from home.
Some call it destiny,
and others call it fate.
I call it by the only name I know.More of what is, please. I want more.
Another measure from your bosom,
more treasure from your stores,
I want more.This mother who gathers us,
ever in her arms,
she bears you both body and soul.
Do you feel her gravity?
(Not holding you in space.)
She holds your existence, and whispers your name.More of what is, please. I want more.
Shout it out into the night,
or whisper it quiet,
I want more.All that’s pleasant, every pain,
give me all the sunshine cold and rain.
I want faith, and I’ll have doubt.
No, there’s nothing I will deign to live without.
The sharpest teeth, the sweetest kiss,
cover me in everything that is.
I’ll have hope, and I’ll have fear,
gather all and whisper in my ear:“There’s a trail you can tread upon
for your entire life,
and never get any further from home.
Do you see that everything
is bounded in a bond
a co-inherent union where we are lovers all?”So more of what is please. I want more.
Shout it out into the night,
or whisper it quiet.
Keep and hold me tight,
Draw me deeper inside.
I want more.
Updates
The New Canadiana: For those of you who missed its first issue, this month I launched a new journalistic project I’m calling The New Canadiana. This project will see me interviewing twelve Canadian singers and songwriters in 2025 in my quest to encounter the soul of folk and country music in Canada right now. For the first edition, check out the conversation I had with the deep-souled producer and songwriter Simon Bridgefoot from Vancouver, British Columbia. Stay tuned for the next edition of The New Canadiana which will feature Rachel Kimmelman of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The City Kid Song Circle: The Spring 2025 edition of the City Kid Song Circle met for the first time in January. It was a really beautiful time of creative collaboration and cultivation. We will meet two more times before we gather for our concert in April here in Halifax.
I’m so pleased to be launching this new project here on the newsletter. If it excites you too, please consider sharing about it with friends and family. And as always, thanks for listening and reading.
—Matthew
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