The other side

So… Eurovision is on the TV.  Signals another year over.  An eventful year all round really.  For me personally, musically it has been a ball.

I need to make an announcement.  You should all by now be aware of my Eleventh Hour project with Bill Ryan.  Well, we are nearing completion of the album, and therefore a release date is fast approaching.  I have therefore made the decision to separate Eleventh Hour related information to a dedicated website.

The website is www.eleventhhourinitiative.com .  I hope you will all take the time to check out both sites.  The Eleventh Hour site takes an interesting twist as I am now able to publish the thoughts of Bill Ryan too.  We decided that having Eleventh Hour material on this site complicated things and made it unclear as to what Confession of the Whole School and the Eleventh Hour actually are.

Simply put… Confession of the Whole School remains my sole project.  My sole means of expression and a doorway into my life.  Confession of the Whole School is increasingly providing me with an outlet to air my views and push forward the boundaries of music.  I make these bold statements a lot, and I concede that I may come across as arrogant and/or pretentious.  This is not the case.  I am just confident in my ability and certain that I can give the music world something truly different.  If you have not yet heard my debut album then consider giving it a listen.  In any case, the past is gone.  I am now working on new things.  I don’t want to spill too many beans… but I’m working on an idea at the moment that will be so different it will probably split opinion in a devastating fashion.  It may be my Dark Side of the Moon… or it may be my Rudebox.  Too early to know right now.  But I am excited and that is perhaps the most important thing.  I am fed up of music for music’s sake.  And that is what I hear more than anything these days.  My next Confession of the Whole School work will blow away the cobwebs.  It is a project SO personal that it will be a difficult listen.  But I hope that it will also be so fresh that it will make an impact.  For you see… although I am proud of what I achieved with the collection of songs that became All Monsters and Dust, at the end of the day a collection of songs is all it was.  There were consistent themes in the newer songs – songs such as Perhaps I’ll Kill You and The Last Gasp.  But on the whole it was the summing up of an era of my life.  This next project (which I shall keep under wraps for now) is a set of songs written in the here and now.  A number of songs that are thematically consistent and tell a story.  Most importantly they are the most straight from the soul lyrics I have written.

Don’t get me wrong – I have certainly written songs that are from my heart before.  In fact I have only ever written from the heart – I’m not really a story song writer.  But those songs have been traditional.  Songs like Salt Cellars and Out of the Low Times… in fact all the Alexi in Winter material, were intensely personal.  The thing is… they were definitely what you would call standard songs.  They didn’t break many rules.  They conformed and in some ways they were all the better for it.  Those songs still make me cry.  They remind of a time when things seemed broken.  I still hear it in those lyrics.  But they are poetic.  I made an effort to make the lyrics conform to the flowered up norm.  The effort to hide the emotion behind layers of rhyme.

I’ve been there and done that.  My next Confession of the Whole School project discards the traditional.  It abandons the norm.  Think Perhaps I’ll Kill You upped a thousand times.  Action Hero is probably going to be part of the next project.  If you are in any doubt about how different I’m intending to be then just give that song another listen.  … and imagine a whole collection of songs in that vein.  See?  Interesting isn’t it?

The Eleventh Hour Initiative on the other hand has become much more than a side project.  Where Confession lets me spill my soul, the Eleventh Hour allows me to concentrate on the art of music.  On the craft.  On the togetherness.  On the solid spirit of the concept of the album.  Most importantly it lets me work with a singer who has a great take on the classic lyric.  In many ways he embodies the opposite idea of lyric writing than I do with my current Confession material.  I think Bill still has that classic poetry along with an intelligence that catapults the words to new heights.  While the Eleventh Hour is me… it is so different from Confession of the Whole School that it HAS to have a separate website.

Anyway… I kind of got waylaid there.  I think I drifted into other subjects and lost sight of what I was supposed to be saying.  But that’s not important.  I just like talking to you all.  Goodnight.