Author Archives: BJD

Song Week 2025 – Week 21: Are we following preordained paths through our lives or is everything that happens a matter of chance? As long as there have been humans we have wrestled with this question.

Song Week 2025 – Week 20: Sometimes songs just work better stripped back (and a little faster). Version 2 of This Time.

Song Week 2025 – Week 19: Inspired by watching TV and movies about missing people I think. The lyrics just grew out of nothing as I played.

Song Week 2025 – Week 18: I reached the top and had to stop or something akin to that

Song Week 2025 – Week 16: Figures of three female deities stretch back in history for at least 6000 years and they are present in all the lands that gave birth to the Celtic, Germanic and Norse cultures. They were still present hundreds of years later in Anglo-Saxon England, where they were called the Wyrd Sisters (or Nornir in Norse culture). Even the gods were subject to the power of the sisters. Wyrd would roughly translate as destiny or fate. The sisters were believed to sit below the tree of life, which linked the underworld, middle earth (where people lived) and the upperworld. There, they wove the threads of destiny, creating for each of us a life pattern.

Song Week 2025 – Week 14: This quirky little song is about that stage in a young romance when people are still dealing with differences and doubts shortly after falling in love.

Song Week 2025 – Week 12/13: Lord of the Rings is not only rooted in Tolkien’s understanding of early Medieval culture and mythology but also his experience of war and geopolitics in the early twentieth century. Mash that up with history repeating itself and you have ‘The Cold Winds’.

Song Week 2025 – Week 11: Here is the fourth song in my project ‘Tess’. In this scene Jack Durbeyfield shares news of his apparent link the historic d’Urberville family with his friends in Rolliver’s Bar, where he is advised to send his eldest daughter Tess ‘to make kin’ with a family of that name living nearby.

Song Week 2025 – Week 10 The third song and ‘storyboard’ for a musical based upon Tess of the d’Urbervilles. In this scene The Priest reveals to Jack Durbeyfield that his name is a distortion of d’Urberville and that he might, in fact, be related to a long line of noblemen and knights. This event seeds the second thread of Tess’s fate, her chance meeting with Angel Clare and now the path she will be set upon by her father.

Song Week 2025 – Week 9 This is the second ‘storyboard’ for a musical/concept album based on Tess of the ‘dUrbervilles. Not sure where its going to end up! This is the scene where Tess is dancing on the green with the other young women of Marlott and where she first meets Angel Clare. I have used the Priest as both the forger of Tess’s destiny and narrator. This consists of two simple folk tunes, largely instrumental. Act 1 Scene 2.