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I’ve told the story behind making this album before, not least in the digibook that came with the original release through @eucitizenschamp, but I thought I’d tell it again, and maybe in a bit more detail. It happened by accident.
1/ https://open.spotify.com/album/7fe3nHyaGZAbgvlERe96au?si=ZO2IC9fFSGuZSPyhXcqktA
1/ https://open.spotify.com/album/7fe3nHyaGZAbgvlERe96au?si=ZO2IC9fFSGuZSPyhXcqktA
(Please note that this is a re-release. Due to the extreme generosity of many people, the original version made a little over £6k for @the3million over nearly a year, and every penny went directly to them. This re-release is not in aid of them, but does include a bonus track)
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On New Year’s Eve 2019 I had what is kindly termed a mental health episode and is more colloquially known as a full-on mental breakdown. I won’t go into details, but it spoiled a very lovely New Year trip for some much-loved friends.
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At the time I was completely immersed in anti-Brexit stuff. I lived and breathed it. I read and scrolled Twitter constantly. I tweeted endlessly, wrote and pitched articles, was involved with a campaign group, did occasional TV and radio spots on it. It was 100% immersion.
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I disregarded myself and others. Didn’t look after myself, stayed up all night reading and writing, crammed whatever I needed to keep going at that moment into my mouth, and wasn’t paying nearly enough attention to family and friends.
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I hadn’t even devoted time or energy to properly grieving for my dad, who’d died the year before. I passed this off as being because we’d had a difficult relationship. It wasn’t, really. It was more because I was too deep in what I was doing to see anything else.
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So it came to a head. My brain and body had had enough, and basically put themselves into standby mode.
I went to the doctors that January and told him, as best I could, all of this.
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I went to the doctors that January and told him, as best I could, all of this.
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Aside from a referral to therapy and a renewal of my SSRI prescription, he said that I had to find something to do that would take my mind completely off Brexit and politics. Something unrelated and relaxing to occupy my time.
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So I came up with the idea of finding all of the unused guitar pedals I had kicking about in boxes, hiding behind amps, and propping doors open, and testing them all out, one by one. “That’ll take a week of daytimes,” I thought.
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I thought I might find the odd gem, or could sell those I didn’t like and buy some new more fun ones. I built a pedalboard to test them on for convenience, but also to take up more time with my mind occupied, and sat down on the floor to start.
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One thing about the Boss DD-7 delay is that when you turn the power supply its attached to on, it powers up already in “on” mode. Most pedals dont do this. They sit there with power to them ready for you to engage them with the foot switch.
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I didn’t know this. So when I went to try the MXR Carbon Copy delay next to it, instead of producing just a nice analogue echo, it sounded weird, and haunting, and beautiful.
I couldn’t work out why it sounded so different to last time I tried it.
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I couldn’t work out why it sounded so different to last time I tried it.
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I also hadn’t realised that the reverb on my Fender amp was turned way up, to 7 or 8. I hadn’t used it since my last gig, and the reverb knob, that usually sits at just under 2 had been knocked in transit up to 7 or 8.
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So the one echo was running into the other, where the first set of echoes were being echoed again, and again, and all that was running into a big, lovely fender spring reverb. It was a huge, beautiful sound that I’d never heard before.
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I could play one chord or note, and repeated, convoluting sound would continued for ages. With some tweaking, it would continue forever.
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It was lovely and relaxing, so I lay down on the studio floor, and just played little notes or bits of chords and listened and breathed for what seemed like the first time in years.
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I stayed there for hours, then days, then weeks, with breaks to go for walks or hook up other pedals, like an Electro Harmonix delay that does hugely inspiring backwards delay (what you play is played back backwards over and over).
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As I lay there on the floor noodling and tweaking pedals, little motifs, melodies and sequences started coming up again and repeating themselves.
It was so calming that I thought I’d record some of them just so I could listen myself when anxiety hit.
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It was so calming that I thought I’d record some of them just so I could listen myself when anxiety hit.
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I seemed to have invented this new type of music that sounded a bit like Enya, and a bit like those meditation tapes you used to get, and a bit like some of the weird stuff friends with more eclectic music taste than me liked.
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Obviously, I hadn’t invented anything as googling “Ambient guitar” instantly showed me, but it also took me down a rabbit hole of listening to other people doing similar things, and finding out how they went about making their sounds, and of course buying pedals.
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3 months into this thing that I thought might occupy my mind for a week or two, I had 4 or 5 tracks recorded and decided that I should make it into an album.
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Another 3 months later it was finished, with beautiful artwork made by a wonderful friend using my brother @jameswfortune’s brilliant photography, and a few months after that it was released.
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I’m not cured and never will be - I had another major MH episode in summer last year that led to me leaving politics and political Twitter altogether, but making this has helped me enormously.
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And it still does. When depression and anxiety hit, I tend to withdraw completely, but guitar, and ambient guitar in particular, have given me somewhere positive to withdraw to.
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It’s odd to say this, but the best compliments I’ve had are that the album is meditive, or they find it comforting to have on when doing something else, or it helps them sleep. Making it did all of that for me. It’s what it’s really for.
https://music.apple.com/be/album/one-thousand-days/1541174169
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https://music.apple.com/be/album/one-thousand-days/1541174169
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P.S., Doing this thread (again, arguably) was sparked by hearing the wonderful @adampayne26 and the @OhGodWhatNowPod team talk about their experiences with burnout in this week’s podcast, and a really, really lovely DM about the album from @Cozzer. Thank you!
And thanks to anyone who feels able to talk openly about mental health and related issues. It makes a real difference to me every time I read or hear someone doing it. It helps so much to know that you’re not alone.
