Aug 2022 - my inAugural first-of-the-month newsletter, and my inAugural Dialogic record release (Aug 5th 2022). What a lot of Augs!
So, new to this as I am, I hope to set aside these few words a month to give you any Dialogic news, along with musings on how that might fit in with the bigger picture.
Before Dialogic was even a twinkle in my eye I wrote and performed my songs on acoustic guitar. But I would dream of a bigger soundscape, and in recent months that dream has spilled over into reality.
Towards the end of last year I started going to a music studio in Gateshead to work on recording a few of my songs with producer Paul Worthington. Around the same time, I was lucky enough to gather some amazing friends into a band to perform live. Exit Tom Sykes on acoustic guitar, enter Dialogic with synth, electric guitar, drums, bass, layers of vocals and sonic effects. My songs now sound bigger - much bigger!
'Safe On Your Way', Dialogic's debut release, comes out on all the usual streaming platforms on Aug 5th. Do please have a listen.
Further releases are in the pipeline, so watch this space.
These are exciting times for me, and I am seriously grateful to band mates Iain, Paul, Jock and MM for lending their prodigious talent to back my songs in live performance. I'm also grateful to producer Paul for taking me under his wing with the hefty tasks of recording, releasing, and finding a digital audience. A steep learning curve, indeed!
I have all sorts of wider thoughts, prompted by this exciting chapter in my life. 'How in music, how in life', is a start point. There's a sort-of circularity that I'm experiencing: when I devote time and energy to making music, the process seems to affect lots of different areas of my life. And that, in turn, of course affects my music-making.
Another way of saying it could be, 'How in life, how in music'. It's kind of obvious that the various gifts and neuroses that I have kicking about in my general life are going to be at play when I make music. There's a feedback loop which means that as I work on 'me as musician' it's also informing 'me as human', and vice versa.
I guess that feedback loop applies to lots of things, for better or worse. How you are in one area of life informs and reflects on how you are in life in general. I have the sense in my own life, and in looking around at others, that engaging in something/anything 'creative' is great, or even necessary, for well-being. We are creative beings, after all.
As we create, so we evolve in our own creation.
As I release my first recorded song to the digital world, I feel myself slowly changing and growing, hopefully for the better (ask my family and friends - they'll give you the unvarnished version!). Music can, and does change things for the better.