https://open.spotify.com/album/2toNWkyFlrlPfkjoTJz8Pe?si=mKCnW5P2QFustTBtV5Q6LA
https://www.deezer.com/album/152094252?utm_source=deezer&utm_content=album-152094252&utm_term=2597901782_1592561509&utm_medium=web
https://music.apple.com/gb/album/hysterical-semaphore/1516125380
Friday June 19th 2020 sees the release on all the major streaming sites of 'Hysterical Semaphore' a new album of songs by Warren Jenks, A most eclectic collection, made in the supposed 'downtime' Mrcorbett gives himself after he finishes his own album. All was going well in this rest period in late 2019 until one day at the Piano doodling, i wrote a really nice sequence which I christened 'Jelly' and liking it too much to leave it as a track for Mrcorbett's next project, I decided to get stuck into turning it into a song. A fatal trap for any songwriter as soon I found during my 'Jelly' practices before recording, new and strong Piano ideas swooping in and demanding similar treatment. So I thought after a while 'maybe a Warren Jenks EP of Piano based songs would make a nice little project. So this now commenced and was hugely enjoyable and for once I have to say, pretty stress free.
Within a couple of weeks I had the four piano songs done and dusted. 'Jelly' which kind of lost itself in 70s epic Pink Floyd Rpck, nothing like I planned for it, but once I had added a very Gilmouresque Guitar I just went with it! Next came a proper Piano Ballad 'if Water is Movement' finally achieving a long held ambition of mine to write such a song. It really is a great thrill when you can sit down at a piano and play your own song with both hands at once! To counter this musical bliss I next went as usual in a completely different space in my mind to create 'The Cartwheel Anarchist' Having always loved Abba's huge Piano pop hits since I was a kid, I had the fun idea to take my very Abbaesque riff and instead of giving it a sugar sweet lyric, give it a murderous and dark spin instead. This was great fun, some of my lyric did make me feel a tad uneasy in proceeding, but if anyone gets to the end of the song, they will discover our title character gets his rightful comeuppance. For the final Piano song I used what was the most difficult sequence I had yet created to make a slice of throwback electro pop which I christened 'Redaction'. I loved working on this song, making use of some of my all time favourite Synth plugins and recording techniques to create a song which deals with correcting life's mistakes and which soon became a favourite on the album for me.
Soon though, as ever with me I wanted more and then had this crazy idea of writing and recording songs on the spot, something i've very rarely done as my main modus operandi is to collect up say 20 of my favorite 'old' ideas and develop them into finished masterworks! I do love to improvise though and when i played live, i often used to back a poet who would put me on the spot on the night to accompany him with some freshly created musical piece. I did enjoy this although it often max stressed me out when he first asked! Anyway I had this idea to add at first two such 'on the spotters' to make a maxi EP and also add some variety as they were going to be strictly Guitar based.
The first and easiest idea that came to me was to replicate my earliest ever musical collaboration technique. This was way back when I was 13 and me and my best mate Richard one summer holiday decided after he had a Guitar for his birthday to write some songs 'like the Beatles do' He couldn't play a note to start and the tuning was nowhere near, so what he would do is simply pick the open strings in random patterns whilst Guitarless me banged out a rhythm on old biscuit tins (his mum had a lot of biscuit tins) to this we would sort of sing / talk our freshly and daily written lyric. (There is a tape of this still in existence incase you are eager to hear this racket!) Anyway I decided that all those years later a similar approach to a song (minus biscuit tins) would be great fun. From this soon sprang 'Hypnotic' a hugely entertaining song to record and another push on for this by now most enjoyable return to recording. Next I picked up a guitar that was somewhat closer to being in tune and improvised the riff that became 'Money Matters' a ranty rocker very reminiscent in tone to my 2007 moaner 'I'm a Fool' This recording was done on my freshly purchased Mixcraft 8 (I usually use Cubase) and makes use of the sample library provided to give the track some added character. By now I was thinking album as all the tracks so far were certainly up to my Mrcorbett level and also the bug for recording in this new and exciting way was really too strong to stop.
For the next two songs I decided to build them all from Mixcraft samples and then write words to whatever tune I came up. This experiment gave me the very quirky and annoying 'Y'Know' a comic tale about everyone who drops this into every sentence they speak, you know! I honestly ended up just playing a bit of guitar and singing on this, looped samples doing the rest, a very strange experience but the end result was another fun and strong song. Next up I lessened this approach a tad and created 'Confusion' Another comic effort which had the working title of 'a tad porno' this is the level we are talking here folks! With both of these safely in the can, i was now perilously close to a full album. With thinking back to me and Richard again, I decided to revive a very old lyric from my late teens and see what i could make of that 'Shadows from the Past' was the answer, a proper rocker which I loved putting together, musically simplistic in nature but as tight a recording as I'd ever laid down in the past seventeen years since I started writing and recording again.
So now we had nine songs, four Piano, Two improvised ,Two built from samples and one revived old lyric turned into a song performer. This is where i admit I was now feeling a bit fatigued and although I could have cheated and added in a couple of good Mrcorbett outtakes to fill the album out, i decided after a weeks rest that this project deserved to be finished properly. So In the spirit of random I chose two ideas from my Dictaphone collection which were unnamed. Usually I name and rate them to speed my choices for albums, but occasionally I cannot face naming another 100 bits of babble and guitar / piano demo and they slip the net! There was somehow magic in the air though when I opened up a unnamed collection from 2012 and clicked on a file. This haunting little guitar sequence struck me as a goer straight away. I believed later it was probably a very early version of my 2013 song 'The Mirror and the Magpie' but sounding nothing like how that song turned out to be. So i quickly leaned and then developed the sequence into a full song, To this I added a very moody lyric inspired by my love of the music in the TV show 'Killing Eve' and soon I was going at maximum moodiness and angst to create what became 'I Can't Find Heaven (and Heaven Can't find Me)' which soon became an obvious lead off track. Finally I was almost there, my second major project of 2019 just needed one more song, this was another lovely find of a simple Open C riff which I turned into the albums original closer "Song of the Moon' A very personal song with echoes of the memory of my late Mum, it was the tenth anniversary since she had lost her battle with cancer and I was feeling obviously very emotional, and just tried to express that in the lyric. I don't think I quite got there as maybe somethings are still too close to let go of, but the actual song is one I hope she would have enjoyed hearing.
For the streaming release I decided to add in a song from 2018 about my favourite silent and early talkie movie star Clara Bow. I used to love coming in after a late shift and watching her old films on YouTube and after buying her Biography and reading about all her troubles throughout her life, thought it would be nice to write a song for her. This I soon finished and put out on Soundclick in 2018 where it did really well, loads of plays and downloads. One thing was it was very sample heavy and having since gained a Piano, I decided in early 2020 to remix it and scrap as many of the samples as possible and replace them with my efforts. This new version of 'The Eyes of Clara Bow' went so well that I decided it deserved a chance of a wider audience and thus on it went as a bonus track of sorts!
I do hope that anyone who reads this blog will give 'Hysterical Semaphore' a listen, I always live in hope that somewhere out there, there are people who 'get me' and my music! I live in hope.
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