John
written & produced by George Moorey & Shane Young
artwork by Zariq Rosita Hanif
George:
This is John in 1955 by The Pheasant Inn in Columbia Street, Gloucester. The inn is no longer there and Columbia Street is part of a 60s council estate which was built after the slum housing was removed. It's just around the corner from where I live.
John is a Gloucester native, born and bred. He was the last in a line of his family's coal merchant business. He left school at 15 and began 50+ years delivering of coal to the city and surrounding countryside. He told me about his early days with horse and cart to eventually having a motorised truck, of the people and places he delivered to as well as his adventures as a rifleman during national service.
It's first song Shane and I wrote for the album. It established the process for how each of the songs on the album were written and composed. I recorded my conversation with John and sent it to Shane who listened and wrote lines of poetry in response. I read the poetry and sat with it while I made a musical sketch. The sketch went back to Shane and he transformed his ideas in the poem into lyrics.
All of The Powdered Earth's back catalogue up till now was composed on piano. I began 8 new songs using acoustic guitar. I'm not sure why, maybe it was simpler and more immediate. I left a guitar in the living room and picked it up most evenings for about a month to see if I could grab any nice chord progressions out of the ether.
I played the guitar and quickly captured rough recordings using a phone. I just use the video recorder app to grab the audio, nothing fancy. Then I'll review the next day or, if I'm feeling motivated and it feels right, I'll go straight to my studio in the cellar to record a few parts properly. Sometimes it'll just be guitar and piano or sometimes I'll layer up band parts too with bass and drums. Finally I'll send it to Shane and wait….
One of the most rewarding parts of our songwriting process is when I hear Shane's first draft of lyrics and melody on top of my musical sketch. I almost always get a massive dopamine rush at this stage. We both know instinctively if it's going to work and I'm never offended if Shane rejects the initial sketch. If our songs are cohesive it's because my musical sketches inspire Shane's lyrics and melodies. If the sketch doesn't inspire then we start again.
Shane:
Songwriting is a funny thing. If you love doing it, you're really doing it for yourself, firstly, aren't you? Then if you happen to be, say, Paul Simon, people come up to you daily and thank you for the music that has had a profound effect on them their whole lives. The way I think of this is that the specificity of personal experience is simultaneously universally relatable. Because we are all humans. But it has also been great to work on our new album with the express purpose writing about the life experiences of others. George's notes detail more about the 'others' in question. It is quite a responsibility to reflect as accurately as possible a whole life in just a few verses, but the stories deserve to be told. I hope that it helps older people feel seen. There are so many stories to be told.
