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A Reckoning Bell (2021) – Album

What can loss teach us about love and how do love’s small acts give a life meaning?

These questions have preoccupied me during the making of this album. Making music has always been a way of working out what I think, but in the midst of an intensely emotional time, it has also been a raft when the ground has given way.

But as much as music helps me, I don’t just make records for myself. I do it because I believe that music has a social function in allowing people to project themselves into and onto songs to come to know themselves and their own lives better. This belief gives me a sense of purpose and that is the spirit in which I offer this music to you, that it may be useful if it’s what you need.

I’m finding there’s no bottom to the well of human experience, that it just gets deeper and more complex. But hope is a wild thing and somehow the light always finds a crack.

This album is dedicated to my Mother – for never giving up.

Jamie Doe / The Magic Lantern
Winter 2021

There’s a Light (2021) – Single

Over the past couple of years I’ve come to embrace the radical certainty that no matter how difficult life gets, nevertheless it goes on. There is something beautiful in that. That the world doesn’t stop for you, no matter how much you may want it to. And as it continues, so do all the incidentally beautiful things that add up to make you realise that it is possible to be crying your heart out and still feel joy at what remains. 

This is the last single I’ll be releasing from ‘A Reckoning Bell’ before the full album is released on 5 November. In many ways, ‘There’s a Light’ is the album’s emotional centrepiece and I hope it can be useful for you.

Huge love to Chris Hyson who produced it and all the players for the spirit that brought to it. 

All love

Jamie 

Blades of Grass (2021) – Single

Blades of Grass is a joyful song for a desperate time that celebrates our unavoidable human fragility and wild need for companionship. It is the second single to be taken from my fourth album ‘A Reckoning Bell’. It examines the beauty and freedom that come from the emotional honesty of life’s toughest moments.

Lyrically ‘Blades of Grass’ is presented as a set of statements each starting with the repetition of the phrase ‘Let it be known’, which like fragments of a jigsaw imply the outline of hard truths learnt. The simple formality of the structure belying the weight it carries.

I hope it can be useful for you.

All love

Jamie x

Bound for Glory (2021) – Single

What can loss teach us about love and how do love’s many small acts give a life meaning?

These are some of the questions that have preoccupied me as I’ve been making my fourth album ‘A Reckoning Bell’ over the last eighteen months while trying to be a good husband and son, friend and colleague and helping to care for my Dad with Alzheimer’s disease.

The title of this first single is both a reference to Woody Guthrie’s autobiography of the same name, taken from a term for jumping a train with no care for the destination, as well as a nod to notions of death as heading ‘home to glory’ and the inevitability of loss as part of life. The single is accompanied by a film shot in Australia’s Blue Mountains from director Mirco Guidon about the journeys we go on to find meaning in love in the shadow of impending loss.

Making music has always been a way of working out what I think, but in the midst of this intensely emotional time, it has also been a raft when the ground has given way. But as much as music helps me, I don’t make records for myself. I do it because I believe that music has a social function in allowing people to project themselves into and onto songs to come to know themselves and their own lives better. This belief gives me a sense of purpose and that is the spirit in which I offer this music to you, that it may be useful if it’s what you need.

As I’ve grown I’m finding there’s no bottom to the well of human experience, that it just gets deeper and more complex. ‘Such is life’ Ned Kelly is reported to have said at the end. But in my experience, the light always finds a crack to shine through and there is nothing more beautiful than that.

All love

Jamie x

My Soul Is A Strange Country (2020) – EP

Liner Notes

The piano is the first instrument I learnt as a kid, and I have always been inspired by piano writing, particularly the contemplative pianism of Bill Evans and the harmonic approach of composers such as Debussy and Ravel. But until now the piano has been an instrument I have played mainly for myself.

I wrote these six pieces initially as private responses to the emotional upheaval of the past few years. I intended to release them in April 2020 but in amongst the initial pandemic chaos, it didn’t feel right. But now as the pieces must somehow be put back together I hope this music can be helpful in the rebuilding. ⠀

Nothing lasts. Everything changes. If I’ve learnt anything as I’ve got older it’s this: the challenge is to work out what, in the midst of it all, you have any control over. This holds for composition as much as for the maelstrom of life in general. For while the prevailing idea of the composer is someone who is god to their creations, with untrammelled power and an infinity of choice, I see the process as something altogether more humble.

I didn’t bring this music forth from nothing. I put myself at the piano and I poured myself out. What came out at first was lumpy, misshapen and ugly. Silent screams and black laughs. And love. But I stayed there and I cajoled and whispered and worked and the form that emerged from the stone was not an adonis but a man like me.

You can only work with what you’ve got, then let it go.

This record is dedicated to Rhia, always.

J x

The Life That I Have (2020) – EP

To make anything is to walk a tightrope between forcing ones will on the world and having enough wherewithal to know when all you can do is float amid the flotsam and jetsam of a life’s rolling waves. I have felt the acuteness of this balancing act more than ever in the making of this record.

The title of the EP is taken from a poem by Leo Marks that was written as a poem code for the agent Violette Szabo in the Second World War. It’s one of my Mum’s favourite poems and over the last few years has become one of mine. It captures the depth of love and loss and something of its bittersweet beauty, which I’ve tried to convey this music. This record is dedicated to my mother.

The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours.

The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.

A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause.

For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours

Gentle Face (2019) – Single

I had the first seed of this song some years ago and it kept bouncing around my head, I had the first two verses and that was it. But I then forgot about it until I found myself singing it a lot in quiet moments over the last year as the general anxiety and collective loss of confidence of our present moment – our politics, the climate crisis and the state of the world – has grown. So I finished it. 

I realised perhaps that I wanted someone to just tell me it was going to be alright, that somehow if we could just go to sleep perhaps things would be better when we woke up- both an understandable and entirely naive response to the situation. 

To The Islands (2018) – Album

Liner Notes

The act of remembering and its challenges, has defined much about this album and me in the making of it. With profound personal and political implications, it is a wonder that the process itself remains such a mystery. For what and how we remember helps define the limits of our aspirations and shapes our understanding of, and expectations for, a world in which they might be realised.

The point where memory, hope and expectation meet therefore, is a fertile, febrile place. Like a delta, it is rich with the accumulated narratives and shared histories we lay down over time, year upon ever flowing year. It is here we sink our roots; here we sow our seeds.

But just as when looking in on Schrödingerʼs poor cat, the act of observation itself affects the outcome. The present tense recollection of the past is always biased by our current selves, the demands of the present and whatever colour glasses we happen to be wearing. In that sense we live in the moment, perhaps unwittingly, more than we give ourselves credit for.

This is important because although we cannot, as Einstein pointed out, ‘get around the assumption of realityʼ, we know our memories are fallible. However they get corrupted, challenged or lost, the effect is like trying to walk in a straight line on a rolling ship; the sudden destabilising of certainties can quickly spiral into an unravelling of the whole kit and caboodle – all hope and expectation reduced to the intensity of the moment. For who are we if not what we were? And what is left if we no longer know?

Memories, however imperfect, sent me back to my childhood home to Australia after many years away, where I began writing these songs – memories of who I thought I was and what made me who I am. Taking them for granted, I set off on a wild goose chase. And as the saying goes, assumption will make an ass out of you and me, and so it did. But it started me thinking about all of this and how fresh and fragile we are.

The making of this album has traced the journey I have taken over the last three years, through places geographic and emotional, in ways I couldn’t have imagined – as intensely beautiful as challenging. I’ve lent on friends and family and had to hold them up. And while I feel less certain about everything, I’m more at ease knowing how little I know:

That a delta owes its fertility to the floods that wash away much of what was. As the waters recede, what remains is the promise of a new beginning, but one which entails its end.

All love and thanks to Fred Thomas, Zac Gvirtzman, Chris Hyson, Dave Hamblett, Alex Killpartrick, Chris Sheehan, Adam Greves and Adam Lawson for their dedication and support in helping to make this record happen; and in particular to thank Rhia Parker, for reminding me to look up at the moon.

This album is dedicated, with love and admiration, to my father.

– Jamie Doe, Autumn 2018

Albatross (2018)

I wrote this song at a sliding doors moment during a tumultuous return to my childhood home in Australia. The single opens with limpid, crystalline piano chords, before the surprise entry of a driving drum figure introduces the idea that another world is continually below the surface. The song propels the listener along as textures of prepared piano, bass and drums build and break like waves on the shore. The voice drifts over the pulsing band, drawing on the the poetic im- age of being alone far out at sea, to urge a message of holding fast during these uncertain times.

Lydia (2018)