com.passion
How do musicians find each other ? A million ways really, but after Dream Out Loud began to go belly up with Mike refusing to finish the album when we were one song away from completion, I began to think about finding someone else to work with, this time with my own extensive back catalogue of songs. I wanted to work with another woman, a vocalist. Now I live in an area surrounded with musicians and many fine female vocalists- you can hear some of them in the ‘Songs’ section which contains a lot of demos and outtakes, but most of the people I knew were pretty busy with their own directions. So when I spied a small note pinned to the local music shop noticeboard, of a singer wanting to work with a producer I thought why not give her a ring?
So started com.passion -which was when I started to take all this electronica out from the studio onto the stage.
Invisible
The Heart’s a Strange Country
Breathing on Borrowed Time
Designs on the Afterlife
She’s no good at Love
Espressohead
Blue Mist
The vocalist was a beautiful auburn haired woman called Colleen de Winton. She had been singing for a number of years in Australia and overseas. The very first song we recorded was ‘Invisible’ which is actually a tricky piece as there is not a single rhyme in it! Colleen later told me she totally resonated with the lyrics and so we started working on a number of different projects together. Colleen was gigging as a story teller at the time so we developed a live show called ‘Trance Tales. Of course this was 2004 and the idea of someone standing on stage with a computer and a guitar and a vocalist was a bit of new concept- some people got it, some people did not. But we did a few concerts and started work on a musical concept also called ‘com.passion’. This project took up nearly a couple of years. I wanted to write a musical that was compact ( just one person onstage and a lot of technology) but also had brilliant pop songs as opposed to the type of ‘musical theatre’ compositions that were popular in this genre at the time. After a lot of work on this project , one afternoon, Colleen told me she had to ‘do her own thing’ and left to form the band ‘Ionnah’. Call me if you want to revive this script, the technology has caught up to the concept now!
Some notes on these tracks
These are just a few of the tracks Colleen and I produced in two years.
‘Invisible’ was the first track we recorded.
‘The Heart’s a Strange Country‘ was also recorded with Mandi Sebasi -Ong on Etnotechno, I wanted to get a much more spacey feel into this production.
‘Breathing on Borrowed Time’ – I have made three versions of this and am ready for a fourth – stand by. This version starts with a chant by the Gyuto monks which I actually recorded live in Bellingen at the festival years ago. It also uses a lot of the ‘toning’ sounds Colleen was very good at making.
‘ Designs on the Afterlife’ – I should publish the lyrics, they are still relevant today.
‘She’s no Good at Love’ was originally written with a Latin beat – I hip hopped it up for this version but I may re make it someday how it was originally written.
‘Espressohead‘ was the two of us mucking about really – it was written for my favourite cafe of the time, called – you guessed it’ Espressohead’ I wanted something that gave you that chatty, buzzy feel of a a busy cafe. Colleen loved to scat and ‘starsing’ so it suited the track.
‘Blue Mist’ is a vocal remake of ‘Jungle Mist’ – also on Ethnotechno. We did a lot more tracks in two years but these were the only ones of my songs.