The
Magic Lantern

There are moments in life for which we cannot prepare. Nothing about the foreknowledge of our frailties equips us for the finality of loss or the screaming, bloody magnitude of a new life’s first gulping breaths. Reacting in all our messy humanity to the shock of a world made new, in each case we confront a profound dislocation that upends fragile certainties.

This ‘tabula rasa’ offers a mirror in which to truly see ourselves, however fleetingly, as naked feeling things, mundane and magnificent, each a universe to himself. Pattern seekers at heart, we quickly reconfigure these new realities, projecting a sense of order on events. But we are changed. We cannot unlearn the truth of own mortality or the fragility of a life contingent. Scarred with knowledge, we press on in love, the twisting threads of a helix in a genome tracing an arc that reaches forward and backward.

This album was written in the months following my daughters birth and my fathers death six weeks later. In their brief meeting in a dementia nursing home, two ends of the circle of life touched, closing a loop I feared would be forever yawning. But in that cathartic moment, I felt another loop open and was shaken. I saw myself in my father, and my daughter in me and I felt joy and grief in overlapping waves, beautiful and complicated, which continue to ripple outward. These songs are my attempt to make sense of this incredible time – ‘A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted’.

I would like to thank Matt Robinson, Dave Hamblett, Kieran McLeod, Robin Fincker and Matthieu Michel who contributed so much of their courage to this music and in particular to Fred Thomas, the truest of friends, who produced it with such passion, holding me when I cried and laughing when I danced. I would like to thank Gérard and Sylvie de Haro, Matteo Fontaine and Nicholas Baillard at La Buissonne for believing in this album and for the love and care they brought to its sound. I would like to thank Chris Sheehan for being there from the beginning and Jason Mitchell for his craft. I would like to thank Imogen O’Reilly for her incredible vision with the artwork and how she used the wonderful photography of Dave Hamblett.

Most of all us I would like to thank my wife Rhia Parker. This record is her story as well as mine and I am forever grateful for her love and trust in letting me tell it, particularly on the song ‘Love’s a Tailor’.

This album is dedicated to Cora with all my heart.

Love is everything,

Jamie Doe
Autumn 2024

I only ever met by grandfather when I was three weeks and he was in a nursing home with dementia. Anyone who has followed my music over the past years will know that my last album was a lot about helping to care for my own father with dementia.

As my wife was pregnant with our first child, my father was getting sicker and I was scared that he wouldn’t live to met her. Very fortunately they did meet when she was three weeks old. He died a few weeks later.

In their brief meeting two ends of the circle of life touched, closing a loop I feared would be forever yawning. But in that cathartic moment, I felt another loop open and was shaken. I saw myself in my father, and my daughter in me and I felt joy and grief in overlapping waves, beautiful and complicated, which continue to ripple outward.

‘Loops’ is my attempt to make sense of this incredible time.

‘Home’ is about the paradox of being homesick but loving where you are. Driven by an off kilter horn groove it embraces the impossibility of being in two places at the same time and accepts the consequences, however challenging. It is a song about the messiness of real lives lived and loved across borders.

‘Home’ is the third of four singles to be released ahead of The Magic Lantern’s new album ‘To Everything A Season’, due on 4 October.

The second single from my upcoming fifth album ‘To Everything A Season’ due for release on 4 October 2024.

‘Two in One’ confronts the overwhelming reality of just how improbable it is we meet the right person at the right time. Written in the weeks following my fathers death and my daughters birth, the song is a cry of love for my wife Rhia and acknowledges the deep fear of how much more likely is we never met.

J x

The first single from my upcoming fifth album ‘To Everything A Season’ due for release in October.

This album is about the circle of life and the wild intensity of holding both ends of it, one in each hand. ‘Trembling’ traces one side of that circle and marks the beginning of a truly exciting chapter, of offering out this music which has been so meaningful to me in coming to understand myself in the middle of the most incredible time, to you.

May it connect us.

J x

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

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 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

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

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