Been a while since I've posted here, mostly because I stopped doing my radio show; but I've recently been helping a local friend of mine Bede Taylor get his self-released album online so I thought I'd say a bit about that. The first listen was quite a surprise - the album wasn't like anything I would have expected from Bede, but this was a good thing; it shows an artist that's constantly evolving, looking for new sounds, new experiences, new ways to tell stories. We live on a pretty small island - the total population is approximately 8,000 people; there's not a record store, there's hardly a music store, and you just don't see cards pinned to shop walls with people looking for guitarists, or drummers, or whatever. So an album like this with multiple instrumentation played all by one guy mostly on an iPad displays a sense of necessity and a drive to both master the art and the technology. It's not a perfect album, the newness of it all shows through in places, but it tries to balance experimentation with simple songwriting and sincerity, and for me that's a sign of artistry - to stay the same while constantly changing. Give it a listen.
