Hello,
Our November exclusive comes from Southend superstar M G Boulter. We hope you enjoy this collection of gorgeous songs. Keep an eye out for M G on tour next year, you can also catch him supporting Eddie Reader in April 2025!
ECLIPSE EP
1. River Fresh
2. Satellite
3. Eclipse
4. Good Boy
M G Boulter - Vocals, Guitars & Percussion
Ted Davis - Electric Piano & Vocals
Harriet Bradshaw - Cello & Vocals
Alfie Firmin - Bass, Guitars & Vocals
Recorded at Maple Studios, Southend on 11 August 2024 by Ted Davis.
Mixed by Ted Davis
"Releasing an album disorders the house temporarily. The songs that don’t make it onto the final track listing are left adrift without a home and new songs (you’re lucky if they visit at this parched time) don’t settle into a context. These residual songs collect and are often lost. This EP collects four orphans which formed individually and deserve a little place of their own.
For the session I enlisted three songwriters who I greatly admire. Ted Davis leads his own band the Ted Davis Trio, Alfie Firmin is a wonderful songwriter who has invited me a few times to play on his records and Harriet Bradshaw continues to release her own songs while touring with John Bramwell, as well as featuring on my ‘Days of Shaking’. Due to our busy schedules we recorded the EP in just one day, a hot summer day in fact on 11th August 2024.
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I go through droughts of songwriting where I agonise that I may never write another song again. In this period there are lots of failed attempts and in 2023 I had collected a graveyard of half finished songs. River Fresh was the first song to emerge intact and complete from that period. I’ve abandoned it and revisited it many times since and I thought it was a good challenge for Ted, Alfie and Harriet to convince me it was worth keeping.
Satellite built up in notebooks over time and would have been a strong contender for the Days of Shaking album but it formed just a little too late.
I ran a songwriting workshop in March 2024 where I took the group through an exercise of writing a song using excepts from a newspaper article. I thought I had better practice what I preach and wrote Eclipse using the method and from it came this song of reminiscence about the day of the eclipse on 11 August 1999, 25 years to the day the song was recorded.
I went through a short interlude of trying to write songs about famous animals/pets. Good Boy is from this period and is about Prince Rupert of the Rhine’s faithful companion ‘Boy’, who was killed at the Battle of Marston Moor when he broke free and ran into the battlefield to find his master. The Parliamentarians thought Boy was a witch dog that ate flying bullets and protected his master with unholy magic.” M G
