Dear Mind is the Ride supporters,
I hope you’ve got to the end of the book by now! If not, then at least it looks appealing on your bookshelves, or gracing the garden shed, or carried about in the luminosity of your minds. This is just short message to let you know what I’ve been up to recently and if you’d like to be involved.
I took a kids guitar with me on my bike ride to India wrapped up in a black bin bag and played it everywhere I went. For some reason cycling and music have always gone together for me (although if you’ve finished Mind is the Ride then you’ve probably realised that cycling and a lot of things go together for me!). I would whip out my three quarter size Yamaha and regale whoever was at the layby / grocers / town square / desert / frontier / food stop with my latest ballad.
Even if we couldn’t understand each other then at least it was a way to communicate musically. Despite the fact I could never play any of the Beatles covers anyone asked for, playing a song was a way of waving at a community, a community we were always passing through and never quite joining. One of the many lessons of my bike ride, and indeed in writing and publishing Mind is the Ride, is how important community is to our sense of identity. We may feel like individual entities but who we are is always tied up with those around us. And those links are further and more disparate than we might ever imagine. Invisible threads knotting into the dark.
At a time when when we feel so far apart from each other, behind closed doors and walls, behind closed borders, behind screens, this community can feel ever more distant. But that belonging remains there waiting for us. Like the Spring days, like the lengthening light that will surely overreach the night.
As I write it is Valentines Day Feb 14th 2021 and I am releasing my first song ‘Keep the Light On Baby’ from the album of the same name with my band The Woodlice. I never put my guitar away when I got back to the UK but I kept on plugging on and went electric.
'Keep the Light On Baby' comes with a video of myself and my neighbours dancing in the lockdown dark in our bay windows in January of this year. Separate but together.
Please take a look at the video here:
And if you like the song you can download a digital version and pre-order the album on vinyl or CD and I will send a copy direct to your door when it comes out in May (a bit like Crowdfunding).
https://thewoodlice.bandcamp.com/track/keep-the-light-on-baby
And remember cups of tea are the stepping stones of life but bike bottles are the trampolines.
Take care all and I’ll see you when I next spin into town,
Jet