Hi!

This Wednesday the 26th is the 45th Rowan and Friends at the Golden Ball, in York.

Rowan & Friends are going to play music, but the rest of the night will be less-music.

First, Melanie Palmer, a brilliant local poet, is going to read some of her poems.

Second, the Yorkshire Seinfeld Revue will make their first appearance with a performance of “The Chinese Resturaunt”. They have still not done a read-through, but they’re confident it will be “ok”.

Third… I don’t know what’s third. Maybe just music. Or maybe I will play some new songs.

Writing A Million New Songs

In the previous email I mentioned I’d been writing and recording a new song every day. Well I’ve - almost - kept this up. And to the time of writing I have written 16 songs of varying quality.

I shared a demo of one of these last week. I have now deleted that demo.

But here is a new demo of a song called ‘I am the food in the back of the fridge.’

I would encourage anyone who is curious about writing a song every day to try it. Its important that it doesn’t have to be a good song, the important thing is finishing it. (You can always come back to it in some form.)

I used to do this all the time, but its been really interesting coming back to this way of writing. And it has produced some weird stuff that I wouldn’t have thought of if I had been chipping away at one tune, trying to make it perfect.

For example, here is another song called ‘Turning Away From Sweet Caroline’. I wrote it the day after playing ‘Sweet Caroline’ at someone’s wedding. It’s really not very good. And I was very hungover when making it. But I’m glad it exists.

I think what this all comes down to is that it is fun to write songs. And make stuff, generally. And - as happy as I am with our album Go On! Roll That Old Boulder Away - in the lead up to releasing it, it was hard to do anything creative in a serious way.

So that’s what I’m doing now. And it’s really fun. And I reckon that a new album is going to come out of it. It just probably won’t have “Turning Away From Sweet Caroline“ on it.

This Week’s Recommendations

FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED - this is one of my favourite Kool Keith albums - under his moniker Dr. Dooom however - and I have been relistening to it this week. One of the most creative rap albums of the 90s. But pretty gross/weird.

UNCLE BONITO - I saw Uncle Bonito’s longest set to date on Tuesday. For those not in the know, Uncle Bonito is a Cypriot-Yorkshire performer who likes to recall memories that may or may not have happened. It’s hard to explain this in a time-limited email. So just look at this video comp he made

That’s

it for this email.

See you all on the flipside.

-ROWAN