I began this album back in Autumn 2023, but more songs are still coming. We’ll see what comes over the next period.
I borrowed the title from Y Tŵr (The Tower), Gwenlyn Parry’s Welsh play published in 1978. Most Welsh schoolchildren have studied it at some point over the last fifty years. I was one of them.
The play follows two nameless working-class characters through three acts of youth, middle age, and decline. Because they’re unnamed, they become universal: idealism gives way to struggle, and struggle to vulnerability.
I was fascinated by it as a teenager, but too young to understand what it was really doing. Coming back to it now, middle aged, I’m struck by how Parry raises the ordinary without romanticising it. He doesn’t exactly celebrate everyday life, but he gives it its full weight. He reminds us it’s what we actually live inside, day to day.
It’s easy to feel the pull of nihilism. I’ve felt that why bother? why care, why suffer reality, when we can hide in prettier stories? But watching two whole lives unfold, the play makes clear that this is what we have. So the question isn’t why? so much as how fully are you willing to be here?
That idea sits behind this album. Like the play, each track is a different room. Not a diary of my life, exactly, but a set of places I’ve lived in. And when I look back, my story hasn’t only been mine. Other people have carried most of the major roles, and I’ve been changed by their lines as much as my own.
My urge to create isn’t just a private argument with mortality. It’s a response to the lives around me, especially those I love. The older I get, the more that colours everything.
Our time may be short, but our lives are braided together. We carry fragments of other people’s stories. We receive them and pass them on, for better or worse.
And if anything can hold those fragments up to the light, it’s a song. It sidesteps the finality of time as well as anything can.
I can’t wait!! Your music is my favorite