Annalie Wilson
don't be fooled by anything
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- @falseneutral @alaskastudio thanks I will check them out!
- @aldoyletweets how did it go yesterday? X
- I'm looking for a brilliant keyboard player to join my band. Unquantifiable benefits guaranteed. Opportunity of a lifetime. Message me!
- @rodengland thanks will give them a go!
- @rodengland thanks Rod they're all booked up when we need them:(
- Anyone know any decent rehearsal studios for bands in South London - London Bridge/Brixton/Borough/Stockwell/Vauxhall kind of area?May 14, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- How important is the silence? http://t.co/pkmizWYK
- 'Track 16 "Silence" has an unacceptable length of silence at the end. Please remove this and resubmit the product.' Errrr. Allo?May 11, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Is it just me, or is it S P R I N G ? Here's what I've got on my mind @theblackkeys http://t.co/4vckOgV5May 11, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- I did not wake up this morning because my alarm was on silent. This does not seem to be a particularly useful function for an alarm to have.May 10, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @VIVOBAREFOOT rediscovering my feet!
- Think I broke the internet. Email me at your peril. Try FB instead. Or phone. Or even Real Life.
- Fascinating article about what makes for effective practice: @anniemurphypaul http://t.co/QHHrl4Y5 via @TIMEIdeas
- @aldoyletweets I do need another pair. Or three. They have most of my personalities covered. I will make the unblind weep with envy.
- @umberto_jr ha, where did you read that?! my new album launch may be in sept - you could come! anyway it's a nice time to be in London.
- Had a charming Friday eve chilling and chatting @spexinthecity & selecting new glasses after I trod on mine. Ravi says hi @aldoyletweets :)May 06, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @umberto_jr oh cool! Thank goodness for google translate. When are you coming? My main tips are: bring warm clothes and an umbrella...
- Moths ate through my tights. Moths go home. Oh you are home. Well go somewhere else then. Or I'll hoover you up. Not joking.
- Whenever people use the word 'unquestionably' it plants a seed of doubt in my mindApr 27, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
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- May 11, 12
It’s an interesting question. I recently decided to put my first album ‘The Anomaly Project’ back on sale on all the digital platforms via a new distributor. (The reasons I took it away are also interesting, but not completely relevant here.) Having uploaded all the tracks I finally got my new artwork sorted which I’m very pleased with, and sent it off.
The album was rejected because the final track on the album, “Silence,” has too much silence in it. The message I received was:
“Track 16 has an unacceptable length of silence at the end. Please remove this and resubmit the product. We can process tracks with as much as 4 seconds silence. “
I was surprised because it had been on itunes for three years without any complaints. So I wrote back to the man at My new distribution agency, who was very kind and understanding of my bewilderment. He wasn’t able to upload it because it didn’t fit the spec. The reason he said was that online music store managers didn’t think patches of silence worked in a digital sense because they are committed to a format where buying individual tracks and playing them in order works.
Now I get this, and I’m not attacking the music retailers for their decision. But it raises a few questions in my mind. First of all… I am pretty sure I’ve bought albums in the past that had long passages of silence at the end. But perhaps this was in the pre-download age. You might listen to an album all the way through and be surprised to find it was still playing long after the sound had stopped. Sometimes there would be a hidden track 20 minutes later.
I wanted my album to descend into silence. I remember we debated for some time about the length of this silence. It’s only about 20 seconds in the end. But is it completely silent? Or is there something in it? I feel like the silence contains an energy of something I wanted to communicate.
As Daniel Barenboim says in his 2006 Reith Lectures for BBC Radio 4, “sound does not exist by itself, but has a permanent constant and unavoidable relation with silence.”
He talks about how sound arises out of silence and goes back into silence. There is a certain, finite amount of energy that we put into creating sound, but eventually, according to the laws of nature, that energy will run out, and the note will die.
“This relation between sound and silence is imperative to understand, because it does produce the first tragic element of expression in music.”
So there is some question about whether sound and silence can be separated so clearly.
The other thing that concerns me is the idea that patches of silence might not work in a digital format, because people need to buy individual tracks and play them in order.
Would it be so very alarming for an unscheduled gap to appear in somebody’s playlist? Do we, as listeners, really require every moment of our experience to be filled with noise? Is the silence before and after one form of expression different to the silence before and after another? I think it is. I’m pretty sure Harold Pinter thought it was too.
What would happen if they didn’t like the silence? Probably the same thing as would happen if they didn’t like the sound. They would press a button and eradicate it from their ears at once. So what makes my silence more unpalatable than the sound of, say, Bruno Mars singing?
“The rest is silence” says Hamlet at the end of the play. What does he mean? While I don’t have time to go into an in-depth analysis of that here, I’m fairly sure death played a part. So can we conclude that an abhorrence of gaps on itunes playlists equates to a fear of death?
On that cheery note, here is the song in question, set to a video I made in the London Aquarium. Incidentally this version does not feature the full silence at the end, simply because I ran out of jellyfish footage. It happens.
And here’s a link to the brilliant, profound and thought-provoking Reith Lectures by Daniel Barenboim – I heartily recommend them – you can read/listen to them here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2006/lecture1.shtml
- Mar 29, 12
If you are ‘sorry for the mass text,’ why are you sending it? You could also not send it. Alternatively you could send it and stop apologising for it. Is anybody forcing you to send it? You could send an email. You could call people individually or send them a message in the post. It’s really up to you. Presumably you think it contains something I might want to know. This is not such a bad intention. I might be genuinely interested. But your apology makes a mockery of my enthusiasm! And yet you feel the need to express your guilt. This is quite unhelpful. Preceding everything with ‘sorry’ doesn’t absolve you from the responsibility of what you’re about to do. ‘Sorry I’m about to hit you in the face.’ ‘Sorry I’m going to sleep with your wife.’ ‘Sorry I’m going to drink 17 beers and make a dick of myself. It’s just who I am.’ In the grand scheme of things sending a mass text is not really that bad. Of course if you send it at 3 o’clock in the morning it’s really bloody annoying. But being really bloody annoyed, momentarily, over a mass text, is not that bad. I might think you were a dick, but probably only if I already thought that. It’s definitely not a deal breaker. So if you’re the kind of person who likes to send mass texts I say go for it. Just don’t apologise for it.
- Mar 08, 12
Sometimes songs just come out, fully formed, as if they were coming from somewhere else, there’s really no effort at all. Other times you sweat for months and months over troubling chord sequences and niggling lyrics – it’s not always a happy ending. Some of them never get finished, they simply lie there on the factory floor, waiting for their carcasses to be stripped of good ideas that are plundered for newer songs with more chance of completion.
I know of few things more satisfying than that moment when a real tricksy bastard of a song finally gets finished. So I was thinking to myself while cycling home this evening, having just experienced this very moment of the final pieces of a puzzle slotting into place – the idea I’d been forming over the last few weeks or so had come together at last in the middle of Waterloo Bridge.
I’d been struggling over this song since last Summer and had performed it several times but something wasn’t quite right. If I was honest, I wasn’t really happy with the lyrics for the whole of the first verse. But I just wanted to get it out there so hoped I’d sort of get away with it.
‘Getting away with it’ lyrics are not really the kind I want to be writing. The kind of lyrics I aspire to are those where the juice could be sucked from each well-chosen word by every new listener and never run dry. I kept thinking of “One” by U2.
“One love, but we’re not the same
Well we hurt each other
Then we do it again”Lyrics that are at once simple and profound, they make my heart turn over. So I was rejoicing on my bicycle that I had at least found a way to shift the block obstructing this song from being truly born. The new words seemed to fit better with the whole thing, as if they would help the song to know itself better.
I arrived home and picked up my guitar to seal the deal. The relief I felt was more like the feeling you have after painting a room that took a lot longer than you expected – there is a sense of weariness and resignation rather than outright celebration.
As I struck the final chord I made a mistake, but I liked it. So I kept playing, and another song began. And as I played, this new song just arose, fully formed, simple and profound, from the other, like an appendix to a long and gruelling novel. That’s what it feels like, an afterthought, or a second orgasm. Weirdly enough, the song appears to be about contentment.
- Feb 27, 12
- Dec 09, 11
The Astronaut is a song I wrote a few years ago for the wedding of two of my close friends, and I was able to perform it as they signed the register, which was a real honour and very moving. We’ve decided to record a new version of the track with the full band as a likely contender for inclusion on the new album. It was originally a solo piano and vocal song, and the band arrangement grew out of an idea of Olly’s to give it a bit of a soul/gospel feel. It’s been quite refreshing to be actually putting it together during the recording process, as most of the songs have been pretty well arranged for a while. I particularly enjoyed this guitar session in which Ben, Olly and I wrote the guitar solo; as I compose all the original material myself it’s a great feeling to then bring it to the band and let it develop further with all of us working on it. It’s not always easy of course, to loosen the leash of creative control over one’s music and allow in the ideas and expertise of others – but perhaps this is another reason why it’s such a valuable experience…
- Nov 29, 11
I arrived in Frankfurt around midday on Friday and was greeted at the airport by these amazing musical polar bears:
It’s a testament to how inclusive a nation Germany has become, that two of the bears, despite not being talented enough to feature on the track itself, are still welcome to mime along with unrelated instruments. It’s just a shame they couldn’t find a genuine harmonica-playing bear to complete the trio.
- Nov 01, 11
- Oct 26, 11
I can’t remember whether I’ve seen Looking for Richard or not. I know what it’s about, I’ve seen posters, life-size cardboard cutouts, had conversations about it, but I don’t know whether I’ve seen it or not. It’s quite possible that over time I have constructed a plausible memory of the movie from the snippets of information I’ve collected. In my head it’s quite a good film. It’s also somewhat confused with The Fisher King, which I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen, but have an even clearer memory of, based on a few very vivid descriptions.
Nor is this syndrome limited to films. I have countless childhood and more recent memories which may or may not be based on real life, dreams, or fantasies. All of which points loosely to the possibility that what we tend to think are solid events are in fact our own interpretations of experiences, filtered through myriad layers of history, genetic programming and emotional baggage.
In which case, it could be argued that my forthcoming film, a much-anticipated sequel to Looking for Richard, entitled Looking for Steinway, is destined to be a huge hit.
In this witty and unexpected follow-up, young singer songwriter Annalie Wilson (played by herself) is desperately searching for a grand piano to record the finishing touches to her second album, when whom should she meet but Al Pacino (played by himself.) Pacino, who is getting a bit bored with Richard, having found him ages ago, takes a shine to the young musician, and agrees to help her in her quest.
Meanwhile Kevin Spacey (played by himself) is starring in his own spin-off series, Looking for Annalie, a hilarious comedy drama in which Spacey is desperately searching for the young pianist who used to play in the Pit Bar at the Old Vic Theatre, to star in his new film, Pianowoman, a bittersweet romcom about a superhero who uses music to matchmake shy couples but is hopeless when it comes to her own lovelife.
When Spacey and Wilson are finally reunited it transpires that he had Steinway in his totally sound-proof London apartment with excellent acoustics all along, and is happy to let Wilson tinker away indefinitely. A tearful finale is then in order as Pacino and Wilson perform a touching duet of You can call me Al, with Spacey accompanying on tea-chest bass.
- Oct 25, 11
I am depressed. I am depressed because I went shopping for clothes, and a song came on – by Bruno Mars, as I later discovered. It’s called “The Lazy Song.” It didn’t make me lazy though, it made me want to punch someone. No not someone, him.
On reflection, it’s actually a rather accurate title. He was obviously feeling so lazy that he didn’t bother to write a decent melody, interesting chords or lyrics that made sense or had any meaning. I feel for him, because sometimes I also experience laziness. What I don’t understand is why he felt the need to inflict this particularly uncreative mood on the rest of us.
If you have hitherto been spared the joy of this song, the premise of it is that he doesn’t feel like doing anything. He then goes on to list all the things that ‘not feeling like doing anything’ is going to make him do. Wild isn’t it? Perhaps this irony is part of his genius. Perhaps it was a mistake. Who knows?
The lyrics themselves are equally blinding.
Today I don’t feel like doing anything
I just wanna lay in my bed
Don’t feel like picking up my phone, so leave a message at the toneIt’s a classic rhyme (phone/tone). Let’s face it, we’ve all thought about using it in a song, but something has always held us back. Well it didn’t hold him back. He’s obviously got a lot of balls. In fact we know he has. Because he tells us about them:
I’m gonna kick my feet up then stare at the fan
Turn the TV on, throw my hand in my pants
Nobody’s gon’ tell me I can’tThis is in the early part of the song, when he’s still wearing his pants. Later he expresses his intention to
…just strut in my birthday suit
And let everything hang looseI don’t have a problem with this. I also enjoy walking around naked. Great. Pro-nudity. It’s just… well so what?
I’ll be lounging on the couch just chilling in my Snuggie
Click to MTV so they can teach me how to dougie
‘Cause in my castle I’m the freaking manBut what’s this? A rare moment of psychological insight? Mars lets the heavy veil of ‘inarticulate moron’ lift for a second to show us the hideous insecurity lurking beneath. In his castle he’s the freaking man. But what about outside on the street? A helpless bag of nerves? A blubbering emotional wreck? Is he being bullied? Does he use MTV to numb the pain of his freakiness?
Sadly, we never get to find out because he reverts to fantasy land.
Tomorrow I’ll wake up, do some P90X
Find a really nice girl, have some really nice sex
And she’s gonna scream out
This is greatReally nice? Is that the best you’ve got Bruno? No freakiness? No manliness? No balls-out strutting-ness? Just ‘really nice’? And twice in one line??? True laziness. I am beginning to alter my opinion of this man. He is a master of the genre.
I hope I have whetted your appetite sufficiently, because to properly revel in the glory of this musical travesty you really have to hear the song. And thanks to youtube, you can even gaze in horror at the appalling video.
Enjoy!
- Oct 13, 11
Tonight I arranged to meet my friend Robin on a boat in Vauxhall. I was in Covent Garden and had some time so I decided to walk. First I walked down the Strand to Trafalgar Square. I enjoy taking the time to be a tourist in my city sometimes. Looking at London with the awe it deserves.
I strolled on down to the embankment and over the Hungerford Bridge. Just happening to glance over my shoulder I noticed the sky behind me.
Over the other side I continued along the embankment towards the London Eye. I love the river. This time of year the sunsets are wonderful, especially when it’s been a gloomy day.
Big Ben in the distance and the brightly lit wheel offer a marvellous juxtaposition of old and new.
Cutting away from the river I came across a large crowd of people queuing to get into a silent disco. The wheel loomed magnificently overhead.
I crossed over Westminster Bridge Road and found myself once again on the embankment walking West.
Everywhere you turn in this city is a photo opportunity. I know I have had this same thought about Venice, Barcelona, Paris – but here I am reminded that London is equally majestic.
I rather liked this sign I saw on a dustbin as I approached Lambeth bridge. Crossing over the main road I made it to the boat, right on 7pm. I enjoy arriving places on the dot. It is a delicate balance. It feels both like you are sliding into place, and arriving with a bang.
Robin was on good form. We drank and smoked and talked about all sorts of stuff, it was delightful.
Then we got the bus together and parted company at Clapham Common.
Goodnight, sweet London
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