Thank you for your warm response.
You can now stream Blue Lament on all digital platforms.
Spotify Link:
https://open.spotify.com/album/5dvJnbhj6gw1D9OS5tzZvJ
Official Music Video directed by filmmaker Emilios Avraam, shot in the Troodos Mountains, Cyprus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r8aNm4PZSQ
Blue Lament is a ballad about loss and grief. I wrote the lyrics many years ago, whilst listening to live blues, in a crowded little bar in Soho, Ain’t Nothin’ But – the Blues Bar, in our pre-covid, carefree days, and later worked on the melody and reshaped it. I began by writing the chorus, which then drove me to write the rest of the song.
I wanted the first half to set the scene for a folk-noir, blues lamentation, and to create a sense of what it feels like to lose someone. The dark lyrics were deliberate; an attempt to try to describe grief, in its maze-like, painful, all-encompassing, inherently subjective experience, ambivalence and longevity.
Blue Lament is about acceptance and the possibility of letting go only by undergoing the myriad journeys of grief. The end of the song lingers on some semblance of hope with, “I loved him so/ will he come home before I’m gone”, that quickly resolves in the truth of “There’s no one here/ this space to fill”.
The song is ultimately about acknowledging the complexities of grief and its anti-linear, debilitating nature, which is paradoxically freeing when it’s allowed to run its fragmented, backwards and forwards, course.
I initially tried to add other instruments to the track, and experimented with how it sounded, but following some performances and the audience’s response to the acapella version, I decided to release it simply with vocals. I recorded the track with Angela Turner, our sound engineer, at AudioHaus Recording Studios in Wembley, North London, and my band mates, Maddy Hamilton and Adam Green as an audience. The track was then mastered by Mike Connaris, Mcasso Music, Carnaby.
This is the second acapella track I’ve released, the first being Love When I Needed It, which features on my 2015 EP, Heart of Stone.
Thank you to Peter Coulston, Shoreditch Radio, for playing the single on its release date 12th of February, on your show: https://www.shoreditchradio.co.uk/artist/peter-coulston/
Thank you also to Richard Strange for playing Blue Lament today, Tuesday the 16th of February, from 11am GMT local time in the UK, on your Dark Times Radio show for two weeks, at any time. You can listen to the show here:
Episode 35:
https://soundcloud.com/user-198290831/dark-times-radio-episode-35
Huge thank you to Malin Hirschegger and Megan Driscoll from Leeds Conservatoire, for your ongoing support and guidance.
The world still feels totally topsy-turvy, and it’s more important than ever to keep making music, to tell our stories and to share them.
Connecting with you in this way, means everything to me.
Thank you for being a part of my journey.
Echo x