These last two years (2023/24) have been an ever-deepening, ever-expanding journey of opening the heart, releasing old love with grace, cultivating loving care for myself and quietly, consistently, reconnecting with states of love (Spirit, God, Universal Force, Nature) beyond the personal….a walkabout in the Big Water Country, the waters of the spiritual heart.
Water and its emotional symbolism is the theme flowing through the creation of these recordings, and the underlying meditation in my process of reviewing the year done and stepping into the year begun, the Turning of the Wheel into an unknown new life. For me, these pieces are by turns wistful, melancholic, playful and soothing, honouring past love or filled with loving gratitude for the beauty shimmering in the heart of our sorrows. None of which may be obvious to anyone else, but it’s where this music happened for me.
I’ve been homeless for a few months now, no regular income, unplugged from the mainframe and existing in the ‘spaces in between’. In the face of such total uncertainty, the removal of all fundamental stability, I can either resist (with fear) or surrender (with love). In embracing the latter, I’m in total freefall….living in flow, trusting in Life from day to day, deepening into the Now and letting the Universe carry me in its current. Only a few years ago this would have spiralled me into shutdown & suicidal despair, but my inner work of the last two years has prepared me well, and I’m enjoying a profound equilibrium & liberation in this state of Being. The learning is to cultivate the stability within, a sense of home in myself that I can take with me wherever I land.
Many kindnesses have come my way in this process, new connections & gifts of resources, money and food, and in part it’s a lesson of allowing help, receiving with gratitude, and saying Yes to offers of support from unexpected sources. I can’t afford rent at present, but I’m not prepared to sleep in my car, so my creative response to being ‘unhomed’ has been to offer my services as a house-&-pet-sitter in my local area…..and so far it’s been a very workable option.
For three weeks over the 2024/25 Christmas & New Year period, I looked after a gorgeous studio cottage for a friend in the coastal bush settlement of Coningham, SE Tasmania. The studio is an eco-friendly design, mudbrick and raw wood, earthy but with a clean aesthetic, a touch of the modern, in many respects my perfect blend. Within it, my friend has created a meditative, creative, spiritually warm space, and I felt immediately at home.
Coningham is very residential but bushy, so while there was plenty of neighbourly activity around me, I felt like I still had my private space. Environments like that make me think of the busy bush neighbourhoods of Tasmanian animals – from the more extrovert wallabies & possums claiming the broader territory, to the introverted echidnas & bandicoots who like to tuck themselves away in their private burrows (I’m definitely more of an echidnic disposition).
Although I don’t participate in Christmas or New Year culture, I immersed myself in the surrounding atmosphere of summery relaxation, and felt like I was on holiday…from a year of challenging changes and hard work, and from ‘myself’ as much as anything.
After being forced into homelessness last Oct, I was in crisis, and my daughter & her partner generously let me use a downstairs room in their suburban rental while I regained some equilibrium. They shared the house with one of their friends, and it was strange being in such a young household. I was approaching 60 and in the midst of a powerful emotional & spiritual expansion via my crisis, they were emotionally shut down, but I reminded myself of my younger me, and the many years it took to develop my emotional awareness, to a point I could articulate it effectively. And while we didn’t spend much meaningful time together, I appreciated having my daughter close after so many years of distance.
They assured me I was welcome there, but I maintained a degree of self-containment out of respect for their space, and that was a layer of strain. I don’t function well with TVs blaring sport for hours or shoot’ em up computer games. On having the Coningham studio space to myself, I was able to relax my energy completely, and for the first time in nearly two years I felt motivated to record some new music, to playfully create again. I set up the living area as my studio and every day was given to music, interspersed with meditation, bush walks, lazy swims & sunbakes, and feeding a one-eyed raven named Claude/Claudette.
Inspired mainly by the loan of my daughter’s Tanglewood acoustic travel guitar and some alternate tunings I hadn’t explored before, this collection of atmospheres (with the exception of two tracks) is what surfaced during my Golden Summer at Coningham.
Murder Ballad and Itchy Feet, Sticky Heart were the first two pieces that emerged as I explored the new tuning I was trying out. Murder Ballad was named as a play on the collective noun ‘murder of crows’ and a somewhat oblique personal reference to the resident raven who was part of my daily rhythm at the Coningham house. The raven was locally known as Claude / Claudette (as the gender was unclear) and somehow in life had lost an eye. Ravens are often associated with communication between the material world and the Otherworld, messengers from the realm of Spirits and the Void, and in the context of my process the symbolism of a one-eyed messenger intrigued me. It made me think of the singular vision, a kind of focused insight, disallowing distraction, required in order to hear the messages of Spirit / Source / (insert preference here). It reminded me of the Tom Waits line “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”.
Itchy Feet, Sticky Heart is a reference to the process of letting go after being so deeply attached – the parts that know it’s time to move toward new stories, and the parts that are still holding on, still savouring the loving memories, because there are so many. My playing on this one was still a bit hesitant, which also contributed to the ‘sticky’ of the title.
The title track Big Water Country, and Guidance Is Internal, two of three tracks that weren’t created at Coningham, were previously released on a 2019 collection And Then I Wasn’t…., a kind of genreless assemblage of ‘orphaned’ recordings. I had always felt these two tracks deserved an album more alligned with their ‘ambient country’ pallette, which this new collection seemed to offer, and the title Big Water Country was fitting to the various conceptual threads I was working with. In fact, I had already chosen the cover image, a beautiful photo H sent me on one of her early morning swims at Randalls Beach, with the morning mist on the water just beginning to reveal the slightest tinge of sunrise pink. There’s a stillness and calm in its mood, an in-breath, a whispered kiss, and the mist on the water has an echo of H & I, sitting on one of our many decks over the years, surrounded by mist or soft rain, when often we observed the world as all water, just different densities…
As often happened with H’s photos, I had wanted to create an album for that image ever since I first saw it, and when I thought of Big Water Country, well, it just flowed…
A Glistening Of Tears uses field recordings of rain & birdsong from the Coningham studio. The music grew from a few dreamy chords I found in the Open C tuning, and an urge to create something spacious and wistful. I was still recovering from ending my relationship with H, still finding layers of deep love as I sifted through the unanswerable whys, feeling my heart moved by so many precious memories from our years together. Sometimes loss is beauty and that beauty is painful….it stretches our hearts to hold an even greater love. The rain, the tears of the heavens, mirrored this mood – even morseo because of the special place rain had in our relationship. Whenever we lay together, in any setting, and there was rain outside, it anchored so many of our loving moments, we would often say: “Listen, they’re playing our song”….a loving moment in itself.
The same kind of emotional reminiscence & aching of the heart-memory gave birth to We Loved To Swim, Each In The Other. Again, the theme of water, this time the ocean, another significant anchor throughout our years together – the literal ocean, our love of being in water together, and the dissolving waters of our lovemaking, our profoundest intimacy, wherein we both lost all sense of our bodies’ boundaries – swimming deep within each other. Even spooning together in sleep had this dissolving effect, dissolving into each other, merged as one energy body, or no body at all…
I don’t usually ‘do’ New year’s Eve, particularly if I’m on my own, but 2024 had been such a significant year, had catapulted me into a whole new Unknown and hammered my world into such a different shape, that I felt some kind of ceremony was in order, some ritual acknowledgment of a cycle closing. Earlier, I had pulled out a forgotten recording of an old tremolo guitar idea, thinking it might fit the palette for this album. I cut out a section of the riff, slowed it down, and spent all of NYE 2024 creating the tidal, looping melodies of Another Turn Of The Wheel as tribute to the year’s end. I went to bed exhausted and satisfied, and frankly surprised that no-one in Coningham seemed to cheer the New Year in.
The next morning, New Year’s Day, I recorded In Like Flynn as a statement of intent to the New Year, and the New in general, a happy Yeeha to the Diving In of Things. Somewhat out of character with the rest of the album, and more hillbilly than ambient, I used ukulele, threestringbox and kemenche (Turkish fiddle). A polar opposite counterpart to its predecessor from the night before, In Like Flynn was one of those easy births, said its piece, and was done & dusted within the hour.
The Coningham studio has direct access to a small semi-private beach, and a beautiful coastal bushwalk punctuated by three more exquisite little sandy beaches, each kissing crystalline waters so turquoise the atmosphere feels tropical. My time there seemed the peak of a truly Golden Tasmanian summer, long & generous, a rare thing here and worth soaking up every drop. I swam almost every day. I felt like I was holidaying in Bali or somesuch. Early on the second morning of 2025, the day’s first light was so pristine I just had to be in the water. My outing became a New Year ritual walk along the coast, a 4 hr walking meditation from the first beach to the last, stopping to swim at each of the four beaches there and back. It was heaven, and summed up my feeling the whole of my stay at the Coningham. I was in bliss.
Beachy La La was a playful detour. It began as a summery chord progression, which led me to think of a summery tremolo guitar melody, which led me to think of all the swimming & sunbaking I’d been doing, and the whole thing was so peachy, cheesy and dreamy I just had to call it Beachy La La. And less flippantly, it was also a way of acknowledging how deeply restorative and healing all this lazy ‘beaching’ business was – I soaked up the Vit D, I felt refreshed from the salt water, I walked barefoot in the bush and felt connected to the land, I unravelled.
I liked the guitar sounds I found on Another Turn Of The Wheel, and wanted to explore further. By this stage it was the last week of my stay and I was trying to wrap up the album completely before I had to pack up; I wanted to keep creating but I knew I had some editing to get done, and I really didn’t want to burst the blissbubble by getting all tensed up about a deadline. Beautiful Shadows was one of the last recordings I made there. Part of me wanted to develop it more, add more interest etc, but I liked the sustained resonances and the atmosphere created by the minimalist repetition, so I left it mostly in its raw state. The title came after reflecting on the shadow aspects of the person I loved, and finding beauty in (bringing love to) those shadows.
Thirst was another recording late in the process, and probably points unconsciously to what was to come – the Tasmanian Primitive acoustic guitar series. Rather than spending more time trying to perfect a performance, and not having any time to edit or embellish it, I decided to just capture it as a solo acoustic improvisation and surrender myself to it. The title has a few layers for me – expressing the theme of water / emotion more as an absence. Thirst for water, for spiritual sustenance, for companionship, for love – not a craving for the solid like hunger, thirst implies the need for liquid replenishment, a refreshing or enlivening of the soul.
In the end, the final track In God We Rust came to be about temporal decay, entropy, a slow waltz into the disintegration of things. Memory dissolving over time, the rusty machinery of life grinding slowly to a halt, the dust of it all…
There’s a lot my love for H in these recordings, as there has been in so many of my other recordings, and it’s inextricable from the larger love I’m making room for in myself through this living process. And as I continue to kayak quietly out into the vast misted waters of the spiritual heart, I remind myself: Guidance Is Internal.