Demoitis: New beginnings...

On becoming a parent, trying to write songs in near silence, Orange Peel, going solo, and the future of Demoitis.

TL/DR: I became a dad to baby Maia (she’s magical). I failed to keep Demoitis updated regularly (but I have new plans for it). I wrote 25 songs while the baby slept. I launched my long-delayed Orange Peel project. I didn’t sleep much myself.

My new bandmates.

Who knows where the time goes? as Sandy Denny once sang.

Well, I have some idea of where my time has gone over the past few months. Back in February, my wife and I welcomed our baby daughter, Maia, into the world. Since then, our world has changed massively and magically. And time seems to have gone into some kind of strange sped-up slow-motion.

Starting Demoitis during the most chaotic period of our time as new parents was probably overly ambitious on my part. Keeping this publication going alongside my own music-making, my work-work, and the steep daily learning curve that is being a new parent has been difficult.

However, I want to keep some version of the project going. With this in mind, I am going to reframe Demoitis to focus more on songwriting in general and my own life as a musician (of which more below).

Silent songs.

Perhaps surprisingly, I have written quite a few songs over the past nine months since Maia arrived. Twenty songs, to be precise, plus another five reworkings of older songs. Many of these songs were written when Maia was napping, so I’ve been composing them in near silence - either playing guitar through my Boss headphone amp or quietly playing my Epiphone Casino unplugged (as Paul McCartney and John Lennon famously used to do, so as not to wake the other hotel guests, when The Beatles were touring and writing on the road). Gradually, I’ve been integrating my nylon string guitar into the mix.

Paul McCartney and George Harrison backstage at the Hammersmith Odeon in London on December 21, 1964 (though it could almost be a hotel room).

Once a week, I go into a rehearsal studio in my neighbourhood in Barcelona for three hours to write and record on my own—before heading back home to help with the baby. It’s not a lot of time, but seemingly, it’s been enough to write and demo 25 songs! Some of these songs are for my “nighttime project”, Orange Peel.

Over the past few years, I’ve been working on various fiction projects, but these have been difficult to continue during these early months of parenthood. However, picking up the guitar and composing songs has seemed to come far more easily. Turns out, that when everything is stripped back to the bare essentials, music is what I want to be doing. Which brings me on to…

Orange Peel…

…is a project that I started back in 2019. I started writing and recording songs for an album. The project was and is influenced by some of my long-time favourites like Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Lambchop, and Mazzy Star. The album was to be recorded with the producer (and my former bandmate from Heavy Heart), Patrick James Fitzroy.

We’d started recording the first three songs in London, where Patrick is based, in March 2020, just before the pandemic hit. Naturally, this slowed down our progress a fair bit. What was meant to be an album became an EP, and now just three singles. Anyway, I finally released the first of these, ‘Ghost Train’, this September. Here’s a video for the track with the filmmaker Ross McClure.

I followed this up by releasing ‘Two Deaths at a Halloween Party,’ over the past couple of weeks. You can hear both of these tracks below.

These two songs will be followed by ‘Idiot Son’ - which is the final fully recorded Orange Peel track (for now). However, I have demoed another 10 tracks, which might turn into an album or a series of EPs. I’m not sure yet…

Going solo from my own solo project.

I’ve also written an album’s worth of songs for a project that I’ve started to think of as my “daytime project.” I don’t have a name for this project at the moment, but maybe I’ll just call it my own name.

The songs for this project were mostly composed on my nylon-string Spanish guitar and more in the folk tradition rather than the more layered Orange Peel compositions.

During this time, I’ve discovered a passion for the freedom that lo-fi recording and sparse composition affords a songwriter—particularly one who is, like me, both time-poor and asset-poor! Some of these songs sound like demos, but I might release them in this format anyway; perhaps calling my newsletter Demoitis turns out to be more prophetic than I initially realised!

Anyway, I will update you more on this in the coming months.

Speaking of Demoitis…

So, I have a few more interviews with other musicians to publish. And I am planning to post these soon. Beyond that, I will turn Demoitis into a celebration of songwriting, a home for my own demos and my finished tracks, and also my musical discoveries as a DIY recording artist.

I will still publish articles by other musicians as and when I get them, but I want to make the newsletter more focused on discussing DIY and low-fidelity songwriting and recording, which I’ve realised, to me, represents some kind of freedom as an artist.

Anyway, until the next time, I’m off to try to get some shut-eye…

James