Feburary Newsletter '26
Hello to all of you creatures who crawl around in the mud, sniffing out bulbs to eat. We find ourselves at the end of another month of the Gregorian Calender (who was Gregory, anyways?) and this time it's February. Here in England, we experienced a record-breaking streak of consecutive days of rainfall and until the last week of February I seemed to find myself under rainclouds on every one if those days. Recently, there have been murmurs of spring - a few splatterings of blossom and the occasional hint of blue in the sky - when I felt The Warmth Of The Sun on my face for the first time in God Only Knows how long, I felt all mixed up inside.
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| Out and Over |
As the seasons have changed, one Epoch of Four Blokes has given way to another. At the end of January we released our second albumThe Wet Garden of Love, the recording of which spanned from December 2024 to December 2025. Those songs are out now - out for you to listen to, but also out of my mind. I have thus thrown myself headlong into a completely new project, the exact parameters of which will remain secret for the moment. I am more full of ideas than I have been for a very long time - I often find myself walking for miles, just having ideas. I have enacted 5 of these in the studio this month, as well as a bit of filming. You can probably piece together what I'm working on as I segue into the chronological report of the month but it's strictly show don't tell...
As you can tell from my writing this month I have gone completely mad.
Anyways!
On February 1st, at some obscure time in the late afternoon, our new album showed up on Spotify! A day and a half late, cheers Distrokid. For frame of reference, My Great Big Feckin' Farm got 193 streams on it's first day, with a full 24 hours to work with. The Wet Garden of Love got 121 in just 7. I'm not that bothered about streams, the fact someone somewhere listens every day is more than i could ever ask for, but it's a good frame of reference. What did people think of the album? Well - I could only find one written account but on release night Jan said it was "like a Psychedelic Trip" and Tiago said it was "A massive improvement on the first album" - people have generally said it's a massive improvement on the first album and I'm enclined to agree.
Most of our comments today come from Newsletter Reader Sadie who "Can't wait to hear Murder Of Crows in her "On Repeat" between the inevitable Jazz and Ambient of the moment. She also said she "Really loved Off the Drink" and I said "Really?!!? I thought that one would alienate people - actually I thought they all would alienate people" to which she responded "If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known." Futher comments include "Godless Hymn is fantastic especially having worked at a Grocery Store myself" and "I liked Farewell Yugoslavia a lot as well".
This jogs my mind of a few other comments - Tom of The French Laundry said, discussing the jazz instrumental Back on The Drink, "I was waiting for the vocals to start". Will, also of The French Laundry, said "a lot of the songs sounded like they could've done with 10 more vocal takes". Ouch! You can't win them all - he did really like the one with the Gregorian chanting though so not all is lost.
February 2nd was the
I'd
track, and after my one lesson that day (terrible timetabling that costs me an extra £5.80 TFL per week) I popped in a little side room to add the Bass. The basic instrumental was complete, but there were a variety of weird and wild overdubs still to go. By that night I had somehow manage to bankrupt myself thus beginning a week where all I did was go for long walks in the rain and had to buy groceries with a voucher I got for Christmas. Ouch!
On Feburary 16th I had another Monday 9AM studio session, this time tracking drums for Robot Samba - I had been listening to all the samba classics on the tube to Uni to immerse myself in the rhythm... I made a composite take of the song, and later that afternoon made an initial attempt to add Harpsichord to Monstera with a MIDI keyboard - this recording was scrapped as I knew i could make the part better.
On Feburary 19th I partook in an evening session, adding Piano to Robot Samba and also recording extra Piano for Monstera - the original part was only played with one hand so I thought I'd add a deeper bass component, but it didn't serve the song so it too was scrapped.
For reasons that will become evident at some unknown point in the future, filming took place at some of these studio sessions.
The last week of Feburary saw 3 consecutive days of recording - on Monday the 23rd, I recorded drums for 2 new songs called Hyperpop and I Keep Waking Up. When I say new, I mean NEW NEW NEW - both written less than a week before recording. Well, it's say written - I Keep Waking Up was written (I came up with all 3 verses in the shower in 10 minutes) - Hyperpop literally only had the one line that repeats for the chorus, so i just left some 8-bar gaps to sing verses over. I dubbed a bassline onto Hyperpop on the Tuesday, and on Wednesday I had a 3 hour session to add vocals to all these new tracks. The issue was, a lot of them didn't have words yet... no matter! As I've said, for the first time in about a year I'm super inspired and just writing all the time. The night before, once again in the shower, I came up with all 3 verses for Hyperpop - I'd saved this meme as inspiration:
On the day of recording I woke up in a cold sweat feeling extremely scared - not scared about the session, this is just a thing I have sometimes, I wake up in a state of terror in a pool of sweat with my heart pounding and no memory of what was so terrifying in my subconscious. Anyways, this sweat meant I had to get in the shower where of course inspiration struck and I got a second verse for Robot Samba - the bridge came to me on the tube journey there and I had everything I needed right in the nick of time. After recording all the vocals I mic'ed up an amp, pointing another mic at it to make it screech with feedback, recorded 2 minutes of variations on that to store for further use...
I thought up many more concepts this month which I'm sure you'll hear about in coming newsletters, but those were the 5 I recorded in Feb. Sorry for the lengthy edition readers, I'm in the grips of madness.
Just a few bits of extra Four Blokes news before I bid you adieu (lowkey more exciting than everything so far but what can you do):
I am really trying to get the live act going in London, I have my Four and I sent all the scores out, they seem fairly keen but I've seen so many people leave one way or another that my faith is pretty thin. My anxiety has also been extremely bad recently which means I'm probabaly overthinking, just waiting for that message "really sorry but I've changed my mind, good luck with the band". Just feel it's gonna happen - I don't know why. Trying to get it going despite that, who knows, next month this might be full of pics of us all smiling together in rehearsal. Part of it is not having Tiago, not having my best friend as at least one constant, one person I can rely on. These are all relatively new people for me. My anxieties around this are probabaly why I've been pouring myself so much into projects where I can do everything myself, where I can't get hurt by anyone else.
I do really, really want to get back to playing live though - gigging the London scene is a big part of why I moved here. We have actually been offered a first gig, which should be massively exciting for me especially considering it's one i was was gonna enquire after and they enquired after me first! However with the new lineup existing on little more than verbal agreements, tabs and a potential setlist, I'm keeping everything on the downlow at least until I've managed to get one rehearsal together. That would quell my anxieties considerably...
Additionally I'd like to confirm I've captured footage of big glass buildings, canals, wildlife, me dancing in the lounge back in Southampton, me drinking beer in my squalid London flat, me curled up in a ball shaking in my squalid London flat, the inside of a piano, and more. What all this footage is for will become clear later. Next month will be just as busy as February, if not busier, even though my anxiety is really bad my depression has been a lot more manageable and thus I'm very creative at the moment, couldn't stop if I tried. It's a see-saw. 14 month bloody wait for treatment!
Anyways - lovely to talk to you all again. Probably quite tonally different this month, especially that last bit, but I'm not sure if anyone actually reads these through and, in the event they do, I'd want to be honest with you. I hope March is full of japes.
All my loving
Harry
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