Writing and Creating 'Inside Free'

There’s nothing quite like thrusting yourself into a complete change of life-scenery to panic you into doing something, anything, to help reassert your identity. I suppose I could have started wearing high heels and mini-skirts, taken up knitting, or become a nurse, but instead, I responded to my marriage and move in the summer of '07 (to an Englishman and to England) by making another album - an EP entitled Inside Free.

Admittedly, my last project Being Here was barely out of the bag, having only been released in Vancouver in February of the same year, and of course nobody had heard it in England, but I was already feeling disconnected from it, having found myself in an altogether unfamiliar place. Call me an organic fruitcake, but it’s true. I’m wholly satisfied with Being Here, but if there’s one thing a Brit will heckle you for (and oh how they heckle) its being too ‘up’, too, well, happy, and while I sincerely doubt (hope) I will never be accused of being a ‘twee’ artist, the album definitely has a Nashville pop-countriness to it that I felt suddenly, not ashamed of but, let’s just say I felt a bit like a nudist bursting bare-breasted onto what she’d thought was a nudist beach only to find everybody dressed in one-pieces.

I had also started writing again after a creativity-free few months (unless having to adjust to a new life can be considered a creative act, which it probably can), and was keen to get the new stuff down and out the door, partly because I’m just like that, and partly for caving somewhat to the squeeze to keep things interesting for folk who are more and more tempted to change the channel in a bored huff. With pianist husband now in the picture, and with him a fantastic network of talented musos, I figured the sun was shining and I ought to make hay.

There are five songs on the EP - four are new since the last record, and one is a piano remake of Earth & Sky, from the Sign & Semblance album; we also re-recorded Dust & Sand (really just to feature the wickedness of drummer Tom Hooper’s playing) and threw it into a pre-ordering deal which offered buyers downloads of all the EP’s tracks in a pre-production state, i.e. with some instruments and backing vocals missing, edits incomplete, mixing undone, etc.

The band really was ‘instrumental’ if you will, to the final expression of the songs. With my first two albums I essentially recorded the guitar and vocals together and the rest of the instrumentation was built around those tracks, whereas with Inside Free I wasn’t sure exactly how the songs were going to feel until the band played them, partly because I had used the piano a lot in their composition and had focused on creating motifs. My acoustic guitar was the last thing to be put down. Carr, Lawson and Hooper are all primarily jazz musicians so there is a lot of groove to be had throughout the EP, not to mention some fairly jazzy tinkling from pianist Jez Carr.