CROSSING BORDERS - 10 years on
It feels like yesterday that I was sharing my enthusiasm for the completion of Crossing Borders. It’s a collection of songs of which I’m still very fond. I feel all the elements are there. In my opinion, songs, performance and production stood the test of time and, if I happen to hear one of these songs, it still resonates with me.
The album was well received in various countries. It won an award in Australia and received positive reviews around Europe. All three instrumentals have repeatedly been used on film series, TV and radio programmes in Denmark, the US, Mexico, Angola and Mozambique.
On the other hand, I should mention that the album suffered from bad promotion (my bad!) and the fact that the songs were arranged with a band sound in mind that unfortunately doesn’t translate well on a single guitar. There are too many musical themes and lead parts going on, and they all seem vital to the mood and the delivery of the songs. The few times we played them live with a band they sounded great, but that was often not the case when I tackled them in my solo concerts. In the end they were often replaced by older and newer songs much more suitable for solo performances. Incidentally, all these years later, distance and wisdom have allowed me to “learn” how to play them with just my guitar and voice. Perhaps 10 years ago I just wasn’t good enough for these songs.
At the time I feel I probably misjudged the shift from physical format (CD/vinyl) to digital downloading and streaming. I’ve always had my issues with the money side of streaming, so I didn’t really push the album on Spotify, i-Tunes and Amazon. CD sales at gigs were still satisfactory but I could sense a shift towards streaming. Suddenly, physical copies were becoming less sexy than they had been when my first album Beyond… was released! And so it took a lot of time to sell all the copies I had lying around my home ad my studio.
And yet, despite of all these considerations, I still think the album achieved what it set out to do and my sense of pride hasn’t faded.
Working with the musicians involved was an absolute blast. Alessio, Stuart, Silvano, Claudio Hermes, Sebastiano and Andrea truly did an amazing job. I would happily listen to those songs even if my instruments and vocals were wiped out!
Unfortunately our drummer Andrea passed away in 2014. My dear friend is gone, and I miss him every day.
On Crossing Borders he did an amazing job. On this subject, let me share a little secret with you. Andrea played them songs the sublime way he did, with just one rehearsal under his belt!! The man had so much music in himself that he could play any style with the authority of a master of the genre. He truly was an absolute talent!
There’s also another funny anecdote I’d like to share. The song Home Is Where I Was Born has a funny time signature (well, funny for folk music!). It’s in the familiar 4/4 time signature, but every now and then there’s a bar in 3/4. Nothing too difficult, but you need to know where the changes happen. When we recorded the track Andrea hadn’t learnt by heart the structure of the song and we had no charts, so I stood behind the console with a microphone in my hand and the lyrics on the desk, looking at him through a monitor and shouting TRE! (Italian for three) in his headphone when the 3/4 bar was approaching. We laughed so much! Several weeks after the recording we could still be seen shouting TRE! at each other, laughing like kids!
Shortly after these recordings Andrea went on to join the electronic band Crystal Fighters, and spent a few years globetrotting and building the foundations for what would have undoubtedly been an amazing career. He was on his way to stardom when his big heart beat for the very last time.
On my blog “Oh What A Night!” you can read all about that amazing February night in which he joined me at Soho Studios and changed the complexion of the album. It really was an amazing night and his performance truly brought me to tears.
That feeling of joy and gratitude was felt every time one of the musicians would add his magic to the tracks. In hindsight, I couldn’t have chosen a better bunch of musicians for these songs. I feel lucky and privileged to have shared this experience with them!
Crossing Borders was a big investment for an independent musician. Unfortunately half-way through the recording process the political landscape in the UK changed and austerity became the order of the day. Big problems for independent musicians loomed. In the end, the release of the album was delayed due to lack of funds, and when we finally released it, no money was left in the pot to organise a proper promotional campaign.
That was disappointing! Producing the album had cost me a lot of money, let alone passion, creative energy and time. Frankly I felt I wasn’t prepared to repeat the experience, unless under different terms and conditions. I realised that the only way I could consider recording another collection of songs was to go solo. So Mr solo musician went solo producer!
Nowadays many fellow musicians seem to have come to the same realisation. With the revenues from streaming being distributed in such an unequal way, musicians have to find new ways to record their songs. In my case, I spent a big part of the last decade investing on software and studio gear and, more importantly, learning how to use it. Meanwhile, I kept writing songs, and many are now itching to be released. Working on Crossing Borders I learned a lot, so in a way, its spirit lives on and has allowed me to get to this privileged point I am writing you from.
Another legacy of Crossing Borders can be found in some surprising places. At some point during the recordings, the characters in the songs started speaking to me so loudly that I set out to involve other artists, from different walks of life. I therefore contacted novelists, poets, photographers and painters and invited them to listen to the songs and come up with creations inspired by them. I also started writing a novel, but that’s a story for another time. The idea was to release all these works together with the album, and perhaps organise events to showcase such a diversity of arts. All this never came to being, due to the magnitude of the task as well as the aforementioned monetary reasons. However, some of these works were released in other formats, so it’s nice to know that somewhere out there the children of Crossing Borders are carrying these characters and these stories to new audiences.
I hope you’ll get your hands (or your mouse) on a copy of Crossing Borders at some point, and I hope these songs will succeed in delivering the stories, the sounds, the emotions and the joy in which they were conceived. It’s a labour of love, be warned, please treat it kindly.
I look forward to meeting you across the borderline!
