A quick tour of the Goldfinches album, Shanti Time.
Author: Journey of Song
Historical and current songwriting hub of Bristol-based (U.K.) singer-songwriter Shaun McCrindle.
Video for ‘Shanti Time’, by Goldfinches
This is a video for the title track of the forthcoming Goldfinches album, Shanti Time. I hope you enjoy it.
I shot the coastal footage last summer, in and around Sennen, near Land’s End, Cornwall. The band silhouettes were filmed later, in James Anderson’s house, by my daughter Grace. James then edited the band silhouettes over the top of my Sennen footage.
The story behind ‘Shanti Time’ is very much rooted in Sennen. I was on holiday there with my family a few years ago and we were staying in a house situated in an elevated position above the cove. I had already written the music and I was playing through the chords on my guitar as I looked out of the window of the ‘Shanti house’. (We gave it this name after learning that a children’s book we were all familiar with had been written there years before. The house features in the story and there were original watercolour illustrations from the book on the house walls.)
As I was strumming the guitar, one of my daughters commented that she was enjoying the music and I decided there and then that I wanted the song to quietly celebrate the peace we were all experiencing on holiday together. ‘Shanti’ is not only the name of the dog in the children’s book, it’s also the Sanskrit word for peace, so it seemed fitting to call the song ‘Shanti Time’. (It’s not the kind of shanty you might expect from a song about the sea!)
Most of the song lyric refers to things that happened during our holiday: from the considerable amount of time we took turns to gaze out of the “high bay window” through to the star-spangled night sky, where we would marvel at the fireworks from Land’s End reflected in the sea. I hope the sense of peace and wonder that we experienced on our holiday is communicated to you through the song.
There is a special guest on this recording (in fact, two special guests). Beth Rowley is a celebrated singer-songwriter from Bristol so I was very pleased when she agreed to contribute some vocals to the song. During the middle section, she and Hester Miller (one of Beth’s singing students) helped create a windswept oceanic atmosphere, as they joined in with the guitar solo, like Sirens singing from the swell of the waves.
Greetings from Windmill Hill.
Photo by Grace McCrindle
Every springtime on Windmill Hill, in Bristol, I hear the chatter and then see the gently bobbing flying formation of a charm of Goldfinches. Their cheering twitter heralds the arrival of spring – and hope – after the long, cold months of winter. I first began to notice them in our neighbourhood a few years back and when Shozzo decided we needed a better name for our modern folk ensemble Goldfinches felt like a natural fit.
Goldfinches is now my primary songwriting focus. The Shozzo trio recently became a quartet when we were joined by violinist Paul Meager. Paul doesn’t live on Windmill Hill but he doesn’t have far to travel for our rehearsals either. We are very much a south Bristol group.
These photographs were taken by Grace McCrindle, in a garden on the Hill, in winter. The goldfinches haven’t arrived yet but we are peering through the branches, looking forward to the return of spring. We also look forward to welcoming you to one of our gigs in the near future, as we prepare to launch our debut album, Shanti Time.
Bristol Boats (“baba ba ba ba”)
It’s not often you see a boat in the Avon Gorge these days but in early November we saw two, a narrowboat and a sailing boat! Boats are a rare sight here because of the extreme tidal range of the River Avon (the second biggest in the world, apparently) as it flows in and out from the Bristol Channel twice a day.
I remember how strong the current appeared when I launched my tiny Journey of Song boat on the receding high tide beneath Clifton suspension bridge, back in the summer of 2020, how “the good ship” got swept away as soon as it touched the water during the filming of the trailer for this website. (Speeding up the video made the great surge of water even more apparent.)
Also pictured above is a cardboard model boat from the Bristol Harbour Festival in July and a beautifully constructed full-size wooden boat that was on display in an artist house as part of the 2024 Windmill Hill art trail, in south Bristol this autumn. Undoubtedly, this was another unexpected boat sighting! The artist(s), listed as Trygg in the art trail brochure, exhibited the boat alongside a floor installation featuring ceramic pots made from River Avon mud. Trygg is a Norweigan word which means ‘safe harbour’ or ‘be safe’ which is an apt sentiment for this boat-y post.
The top image is another ‘local artist’ discovery. In April, during a visit to Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, I learned that the celebrated Romantic painter Turner visited Bristol in the 1790s and made this watercolour painting of the Avon Gorge (entitled ‘The Avon Gorge and Bristol Hotwell’) at the tender age of 16. The iconic Clifton Suspension Bridge is conspicuously absent from Turner’s painting as it would not be constructed for another 70 years, during a famously industrious era of Victorian engineering.
Does Turner’s ship in full sail remind you of my Journey of Song ship?
Jay Auborn – artist-producer
As mixing starts on Goldfinches’ Shanti Time album, I thought you might like to learn about the person who will be overseeing the mix, composer and producer Jay Auborn.
I’ve collaborated with Jay on two projects, the ‘Peaceful’ album and the ‘Life Lines’ mini-album, both by Rock n Roll Angels. Each time, Jay demonstrated his commitment to capturing sound recordings in unusual acoustic spaces. ‘Peaceful’ was recorded mostly live in a church in south Bristol and ‘Life Lines’ was recorded live in the same space without any musicians being present at all! (instead their studio performances were broadcast through a suite of amplifiers into the church space, where Jay sculpted them into live mixes). Goldfinches look forward to hearing how Jay and his team at dBs Pro will recreate the acoustic vibe of Trobridge House where the Shanti Time sessions were recorded.
Here is a link to a dBs Institute online article from 2021 about Jay’s background and his role as the Creative Director of dBs Pro in Bristol. Needless to say, Jay’s been involved with many more projects since the article was published but nonetheless it’s a good introduction to his experiments in the world of sound recording.
It’s Shanti Time!
Photo credit: Shaun McCrindle
You may know that the focus of my songwriting over the past few years has been Goldfinches (formerly Shozzo) a Bristol trio featuring the gentlemen seated in the photograph above (from L-R: double-bassist James Anderson; singer-songwriter Shaun McCrindle; and guitarist John Slattery). Standing behind us are four musicians who helped us record fifteen songs for our debut album, in a large country house in Devon, in July 2024. From L-R they are: sound engineer Paul Bateman; fiddle player Paul Meager; drummer Tony Plato; and vocalist Freddie Bullough.
The story of how this unique project arose is an interesting one. Tony and his partner Gina were unexpectedly given Trobridge House after years of loyal service as landscape gardeners and care-givers to the previous owner. (The exact details of how this happened would make a story only they are qualified to tell!) When Tony suggested to me that we have a jam at his house sometime, I came up with the idea of recording an album there with Goldfinches, featuring Tony on drums.
Photo credit: Shaun McCrindle
During the early Noughties, Tony and I played in the John Matthias band, with Paul Bateman. We all attended Exeter University, alongside Thom Yorke and John Matthias. In fact, Paul committed one of Yorke’s earliest performances to vinyl when he recorded him, John Matthias, and the rest of the Exeter University band Headless Chickens on the Hometown Atrocities EP track, ‘I Don’t Want To Go To Woodstock’.
Photo credit: Shaun McCrindle
Fast forward to July 2024, and Goldfinches arrive at Trobridge House, on a lovely summer’s day, for four intensive days of recording. Paul and Tony have begun work on converting several of the ground floor rooms into temporary studio spaces. In the main recording room there are large mattresses providing sound buffers between the different areas where the musicians will be playing. Paul has set up his recording consul in the lounge. Our guitar amps go in the library whilst James will record all his bass parts in the entrance hallway. We will be eating and sleeping at the house so there are no distractions from working on the album. We have a lot to do!
Photo credit: Shaun McCrindle
We record fifteen songs in a variety of genres onto Paul’s KORG hard disk recorder. However, as the grounds at Trobridge House are supremely peaceful, Paul records ‘The Salt Path’ entirely live and acoustic outside on the lawn, using a single ‘Zoom’ recorder. We record some other songs live in the house too, reflecting our intention to create a spontaneous folk-rock sound like the Waterboys’ achieved on their album, ‘Fisherman’s Blues’, another record recorded in a large country house and one of the inspirations for ‘Shanti Time’ (an influence acknowledged in the album artwork).
Photo credit: John Slattery
We return at a later date to retrieve all the projects from Paul and and transfer them to our own hard drives. The intention is to continue working on the album with Jay Auborn, a composer and producer at dBs Pro in Bristol, with whom I have collaborated previously on two Rock n Roll Angels albums. Jay is a specialist in working in unusual acoustic spaces and is the perfect collaborator to recreate the acoustics of Trobridge House during mixdown (if we can meet our funding deadline!).
This brings us up to date with where we are now. James Anderson has organised a gofundme page to help raise money to pay for the time we need with Jay to turn our Trobridge House recordings into a fully-fledged album (as he did so well on Rock n Roll Angels’ ‘Peaceful’). Click on the Buddha image above to go to Goldfinches’ gofundme page. Any help you can give would be greatly appreciated. To watch a short video about our four wonderful days of recording at Trobridge House just click here. Keep up to date with Goldfinches by following them on Facebook, @UKGoldfinches.
Om Shanti. Peace.
Song Journeys
It’s interesting to reflect on how a song can evolve over time. Various circumstances may affect this including the format of the group or ensemble performing the song or the context in which the song is being heard (live performance, film score etc).
‘Song Journeys’ will demonstrate this evolution of song through a series of short annotated videos. The first video is about ‘Magical Smile’, a song which was originally written in 1994 (as ‘Smile’) but which I still perform, in a radically altered version, today. You can view the video by clicking on the image below. I hope you find it interesting.
The latest incarnation of ‘Magical Smile’ will be recorded later in the year.
Goldfinches in Stroud.
Goldfinches (formerly Shozzo) my trio featuring John Slattery (electric guitar and bouzouki) and James Anderson (upright bass) will be playing two 45 minute sets of original songs at The Prince Albert, Stroud, in February. Admission is free, with a ‘hat collection’ for the musicians on the night. (Click on the poster to view further event details in Facebook.)
John played bass with me in Glass Angel and James played the upright bass in Rock n Roll Angels. Turns out you can’t have too many bass players!
New compilation album of early solo material out now.
‘An Introduction to Mr Shaun’ features 20 songs, including 3 previously unreleased tracks. All the recordings are from the first decade of this millenium when Shaun released his solo albums, ‘Family Man’, ‘Come Around’, and ‘The Wonder’ (by Mr Shaun). As such, they offer a fine taster of Shaun’s songwriting from the 2000s. ‘An Introduction to Mr Shaun’ is available on Bandcamp and all the usual streaming services.
‘New’ Glass Angel release
This retrospective release features 3 songs recorded for the 2017 album ‘In Dreams We Fly’. The songs, which were not included on the original album, will be available to stream on all major platforms and also available to download on the band’s Bandcamp page from May 5th 2023.
Journey of Song 