I am excited to announce finally that a new album, to be titled The Peregrin Heart, is now officially underway. As with the previous album, I am recording and producing it myself and it will be available as a digital download from this site as well as from iTunes, Google Play, Amazon and other stores. It will also be available for streaming on Spotify and Apple Music.
As usual, the album will contain musical settings of lyrical and interesting poems, some well known and loved by me and some which I discovered in the process of finding material for this latest effort. Returning once again are favourite poets such as Tennyson and Yeats, while joining the group for the first time are others like Walter de la Mare, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, William Earnest Henley and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
The album deals with the longings of the human heart and the inevitable losses which attend those longings while we dwell here on earth. From the choice between two diverging roads (The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost) to the all-consuming need to climb higher (Excelsior by Longfellow,) to the sadness of unrequited love (Tennyson’s haunting tale of “The Lady of Shalott”,) all the songs on this album are about the journey to find our true heart’s desire and perhaps our soul’s consolation as well.
We are all pilgrims in this life, exiles from home who follow the glimpses of the sun between the ancient boughs of life’s tangled forest, seeking that place where light is all there is. Along the way, we meet joys and sorrows, beautiful dreams and terrifying nightmares, and all the while we hear the calling of that nameless voice which we know will bring us to unending bliss if we can but keep it clearly before us. So come with me on this journey. I would love to have your company as I travel.
Stay tuned for updates as the album progresses. I hope to provide a weekly bulletin as to how the recording is going. AS of now, I can tell you that I have laid down initial piano tracks for all ten songs this week.
Till next week then, go well and may the road rise to meet you!