An album written by Fred for Inês, and mostly about Love.
We've uploaded a small teaser to YouTube.
Production Info
Co-produced, post-produced, mixed and mastered with incredible patience by Andy Tillison of PO90 and The Tangent fame. "Sorry": to be co-produced, post-produced, mixed and mastered by Thomas Olsson and Mats Johansson. July 2010: All recordings except one track (surprise guests!) have been completed. We're now hunting for a label..
If everyone else can be pretentious about their album names, why not me? Ay? The thing is that this album is about Love, so naturally I'd meant to call this album LOVE, but then The Flower Kings decided to call their latest album LOVE. So I decided to call mine something else. And then The Flower Kings changed their mind because The Beatles & Cirque du Soleil released an album called LOVE, so that they changed their album's name to The Sum Of No Love, which indeed equals Love. Too late for me as I'd already designed my album cover, and called it All Tomorrows, which to me equals Love as well. And no, I didn't get this name from yet another famous prog band, but from a William Gibson novel called All Tomorrows Parties. Of course, Gibson got that name from a famous prog album, but how was I to know? So there you are. And naturally, this album is not as good as the book.
The Musicians
Italy Luca Calabrese: flugelhorn
Portugal
Bruno Capelas: acoustic & electronic drums and
percussion
Paulo Catroga: keyboards, vocals
Paulo Chagas: saxophone
Luís Estorninho: bass guitar
Hugo Flores: vocals
Fernando Guiomar: guitar
Fred Lessing: guitars & bass, keyboards, woodwinds,
percussion, ethniticities, vocals
Adriano Pereira: clarinet, vocals
Maria João Tavares: clarinet
Sweden Thomas Olsson: guitar
Mats Johansson: keyboards
UK Andy Tillison: keyboards, some backing vocals
USA
Mark Lee Fletcher:
vocals
Pete Prown: guitar
Jay Schankman:
keyboards
The Idea
As anyone close to me knows, all my silly acts require an artsy-fartsy explanation, so let me artsy-fartsily put forth the history of All Tomorrows. Initially, I’d meant to call the album Confessional, based on my particular preference for confessional poetry (go google it...), as well as on my somewhat strict Roman Catholic upbringing. But as I went along, I noticed that all my lyrics always pointed to one and the same solution: LOVE. And more: love dedicated to one person. This of course being my wife Inês, with whom I’ve been for some 25 years now. Most of this album is a perhaps confusing journey through my different conceptions of love. Love is the ultimate catharsis.
TRACK NOTES
TranscendenZ
Jude Law in 'ExistenZ'
I'd never written any remotely heavy-sounding tune before, so this was quite a challenge for myself. Incidentally, I wrote most of this in 19/8 time signature, just to baffle my brother-in-law at the drums. I played acoustic guitars, electric rhythm guitar, bass and acoustic percussion. All the rest was recorded by much abler people than me.
Human Again
Warblers (if you can can see them) and reeds
In terms of lyrics, this is a long trip through my life with my wife, seen mostly from my own, bleak side. The lake really exists, some 10 km north from here – we went there many years ago on a bicycle trip on a cold and windy winter day. Plus, all those years back, my beloved Inês and I would talk constantly about our different, bleak childhoods, as if looking for some kind of common past - you see, a difficult challenge in any relationship is to come to grips with the fact that our partner had a very different upbringing. The end section is my wife shedding light on me.
Musically speaking, I wrote a very simple version of this some time in the late 80s, of which only one bit survives - the very last few seconds, where I blandly sing 'human again'.
All Tomorrows
Hardly a love song, or only very indirectly so. Apart from that, the lyrics need no explanation, I guess. The end section is not mine, but from a 19th-century operetta called The Merry Widow by Franz Léhar. The whole end-section is basically a huge guitar choir, recorded more than a decade ago, hence a few nasty crackles and pops. My apologies. I wish I were Brian May. But never mind, he's an astronomer now. Andy Tillison redid a lot my crappy recordings, and made it sound as great as it does now!
Marrakech
Ourika Valley, Morocco
Honestly, that's where I wrote it. Feel free to download my unreleased album Chronicles from the Downloads section on this site – it explains a lot. I recorded this version fresh and anew for All Tomorrows. Jay Schankman's keyboards added a very special atmosphere to this, which I tried to mirror on my flute.
Sorry
The two sides of me
The line Sorry, I didn't mean it has by now become proverbial with several people who worked with me on this album. In essence, I'm taking the piss out myself here, because, in essence, I used to be a far less pleasant person than many people would believe. Thomas Olsson's mad and simultaneous entrancing guitars are simply fantastic – mind you, Mr Olsson is the honourable musicologist of Swedish prog giants Isildurs Bane! June 2010: we gave up on the original version as it was simply too sloppy. Thomas Olsson and Mats Johansson will redo a good deal of the song.
Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
Oh well, if you don't know it, the Bell Jar is a novel by the greatest of all confessional poets: Sylvia Plath (go google). I wrote the whole song some two years after I had moved to Portugal, trying to detach myself from a bleak past, and some two years before I met my wife. Nowadays, I see it as less bleak. My heart-felt thanks to Andy Tillison for turning this track upside down and making it into a really, really cool song!
First Rain
It does rain (or at least used to) quite a lot here in Sintra – have a look at this site for a few picture. The weird voice in the middle section is in fact a virtual instrument called Delay Lama – someone once challenged me to use it for more than just silliness. I hope I managed... Anyway, this started off as an instrumental, but then Hugo Flores added his vocals using a poem of mine. Incidentally, I do not own a penny whistle – that's my dear old baroque treble recorder.
Arklow
Mark Lee Fletcher, who sings the middle section, asked me what this was about. I answered something along these lines: First of all, my ‘watching and waiting’ is just to make sure that the listener knows that I’m absolutely sure that Arklow is Purgatory, as if I’d checked every detail. I worked for a few weeks in Arklow at Siebel, and while I sort of liked the place, I also found it rather disconcerting. Arklow is a former fishing town turned dormitory mostly for youngish middle-class couples who work in Dublin at software companies like Microsoft. I was rather appalled by the endless rows of totally identical one-family houses in strange, silent housing estates all in white and black, with every house and every garden looking exactly the same, and all those young couples also looked exactly the same: former rebels now turned middle-class, Sting-like looking, all with a sizable bunch of little kids that also looked like Sting. Not dislikeable, but dull and as if their lives were pointless. Hence 'Purgatory' – neither heaven nor hell, nor even earth. And in true confessional vein, I had a cathartic dream where and I my wife became children once again so that our histories (and therefore we ourselves) could become fully one.
News From The Outside
My first-ever song (of hopefully many future songs) with Jay and Mark. To really understand the lyrics, you have to know Inês's eyes. Chronologically, this should really have come very early in the album as at that time all those years ago, I did not really understand my wife, nor life - or love, for that matter.
The Sum
Orion
This is where I try to summarise what I believe real love to be: the letting-go at that special moment, giving one's heart fully, and committing for the rest of one's life. But of course this only makes sense if you know the other person. More often than not, people fall in love with someone they do not know well, or at all, unaware that this emotion will not last longer than a couple of years at the most, after which they will have to face the blunt reality of who that other person really is. But wait a couple of years, and you might be lucky and get to know that person fully. And if you're even luckier, you'll like what that person is. Every bit of it. The eyes have transformed into a reflection of The Sum.
Musically speaking, this took me a year and a half to write and record. I had a great time with the African xylophone. My apologies to Paulo for using only parts of his sax.
