Warning : Below is a brief, but i'm almost certain - incredibly boring account of smdge. / Ghostlight / & the polar bear equation.....

When i first started making music in a 'band' environment about 10 years ago we had the audacity to call ourselves 'broken'. I was just 17 & my flair for dramatic bouts of depression was probably at its peak so i had rifled through my Leonard Cohen cds to arrive at 'Suzanne' & the line - '. . . & he could see himself was broken' & i thought that if Jesus could be broken then so could i! & rapidly our little ensemble fell apart rather ironically shortly thereafter. Since then i've never actually been in a 'band' as such. I teamed up with a friend for a few years & recently i have another close friend who is incredibly kind & generous & helps me out with any project i embark upon in whatever way i ask of him. How he manages to put up with playing my music all the time i'm not sure, but we've done a load of gigs together & even cobbled together a band t ...

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Warning : Below is a brief, but i'm almost certain - incredibly boring account of smdge. / Ghostlight / & the polar bear equation.....

When i first started making music in a 'band' environment about 10 years ago we had the audacity to call ourselves 'broken'. I was just 17 & my flair for dramatic bouts of depression was probably at its peak so i had rifled through my Leonard Cohen cds to arrive at 'Suzanne' & the line - '. . . & he could see himself was broken' & i thought that if Jesus could be broken then so could i! & rapidly our little ensemble fell apart rather ironically shortly thereafter. Since then i've never actually been in a 'band' as such. I teamed up with a friend for a few years & recently i have another close friend who is incredibly kind & generous & helps me out with any project i embark upon in whatever way i ask of him. How he manages to put up with playing my music all the time i'm not sure, but we've done a load of gigs together & even cobbled together a band to go on tour with Sparklehorse at the tail end of last year under my now electronica moniker - 'smdge.' Now the band element is strictly restricted to 'Ghostlight' material & we hope to be getting some of it on the road (or at least around London & Cambridge) sometime soon.
These two projects have taken a lot from me during the past 3 years. A lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of faith, & a lot of anguish. Now that they are both finished (well, nearly!) i have spent some time sifting through the wreckage of dusty demos & scraps of tunes that kind of fell out over the past couple of years that i had nowhere to put as i was focused on the projects at hand. I grew fond of a handful of these & thought i'd spend a week or two working on them gently, putting very little effort in really & just trying to get across the rough, in-the-moment style that they were laid down in to begin with. It was rather refreshing after spending so long trying to desperately make the other two projects as glossy as was possible. One take vocals, fumbled guitar chords, some poor mixing - it was all rather fun i must say. Indeed every track from 'Paint Me Lines' was made up on the spot. Even the lyrics, which i hope gives it a nice organic feel. But it's probably embarrassingly honest, scruffy, & unfocused. So - sorry! I pasted these 5 tracks together & when trying to figure out how i would go about putting them out there i decided to go back to my old solo name. It served me well from the age of about 20 through to 25. the polar bear equation. It came actually from a theory i heard once on the radio about the butterfly effect & some remarkably clever scientist summed it up in a simple equation naming it 'the butterfly equation' rather than effect. I liked the reel of it & decided to insert a fluffy animal in there instead of the insect. So here we go. 5 crappy tracks under a silly name with a rambling Biog to go with it all. What a waste of time i'm sure you'll agree. But some of you seem to like some of the stuff i do. Which in all honesty - means everything to me. I've gotten to the point now where i have to write music for myself - to make me happy. But i can't lie - in the end it's all about the strangers - listening in & hoping beyong hope that one of them may say something nice. So that you can get up the next day - & do it all over again. Thank you all for being so supportive of my projects.

I hope you like something in these honest but flawed tunes.

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