An album written by Fred for Inês, and mostly about Love.
BUY the album for any price, starting at 1 €.
A physical album will be released soon.
Co-produced, post-produced, mixed and mastered with incredible patience by Andy Tillison of PO90 and The Tangent fame. "Sorry": produced and mixed by Thomas Olsson and Mats Johansson of Isildurs Bane. Available for download for any price you want to pay :-) We're saving up whatever we receive on Bandcamp to get the physical CD printed, so whatever you pay now will get deducted when and if you order the physical CD.
Anyone who enjoyed the only Mispel Bellyful album ever released will perhaps be wondering whether All Tomorrows is some kind of follow-up album. No, it's not. It has two of the Mispel Bellyful protagonists, but all compositions are by Fred Lessing, so don't expect to find any hard-core zappian tunes. On the other hand, it also means you will have to deal once again with some wimpy and pitchy vocals, performed by yours truly, Fred Lessing, who shall now take the word:
As all my albums, All Tomorrows took ages to complete. It started off with SORRY, recorded basically as a self-derisory studio whim, with no intention at all to produce anything serious. In 2004 or so, Thomas Olsson, who is closely connected to Isildurs Bane - my favourite band ever - picked up on this and got me back on track somehow. Hence reinvigorated, I recorded a whole bunch of new (and some older) tracks, most of them written for the love of my life. As always with my music, I invited a whole bunch of musicians to contribute to the album. Also, I gathered a number of local musicians here in Portugal to redo a lot of the base tracks. A year later or so, Ian Oakley - then manager of The Tangent - put me in touch with Andy Tillison, who then committed to post-producing this thoroughly difficult beast. This productions stage took a very long time as well as a lot of the base tracks had to be redone from scratch, and apart from that, Mats and Thomas of Isildurs Bane agreed to pretty much redo all of SORRY. So time went by, and as it did, the prog world was becoming flooded with amateur musicians like myself. Many labels went out of business, while others became much more big-act focused. So I decided to launch the album as a vanity project, for selling at our live shows and via the Internet. In any case, it took almost 7 years for this album to come out, and it's been a lot of hard work and investment. No, I know, you won't hear that, as you'll still have to cope with my crappy vocals and incoherent writing style.
As for the lyrical contents, you'll probably notice that most of the songs are for my wife, Inês. It took me more than twenty years to find out that love is more than something you take for granted, and sadly nature made a painful point of this in 2009, when Inês was diagnosed with colon cancer. She is still undergoing chemotherapy, and I have no idea how much time we have left together. No, this is not the point of the album, but if you listen closely to THE SUM, you might get a glimpse of what it should mean to love someone.
If everyone else can be pretentious about their album names, why can't I? 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 announced that their then-forthcoming album would be called LOVE. So I decided to call mine something else. And then The Flower Kings changed their mind because The Beatles & Cirque du Soleil had just released an album called LOVE, so they changed their album's name to The Sum Of No Evil (which indeed equals Love). Too late for me, as I'd already decided to call mine All Tomorrows, which to me equals Love as well. But no, I didn't get this name from yet another famous prog band's album, 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.
Italy Luca Calabrese: flugelhorn (you might know Luca in connection with Isildurs Bane)
Portugal
Bruno Capelas: acoustic & electronic drums and
percussion
Paulo Catroga: keyboards, vocals
(Paulo is part of the Daymoon stage line-up)
Paulo Chagas: saxophone,
flute
(you might know Paulo from Miosótis and
Mispel Bellyful)
Luís Estorninho: bass guitar
(Luís was part of the Daymoon stage line-up until 2010)
Hugo Flores: vocals
(you might know Hugo from Project
Creation and
Factory of Dreams)
Fernando Guiomar: guitar
(Fernando was part of the Daymoon stage line-up until 2010)
Fred Lessing: guitars & bass, keyboards, woodwinds,
percussion, ethniticities, vocals
Adriano Pereira: clarinet, vocals
(Adriano is part of the Daymoon stage line-up)
Maria João Tavares: clarinet
Sweden Thomas Olsson: guitar (you might know Thomas in connection with Isildurs Bane)
Mats Johansson: keyboards (you might know Mats from Isildurs Bane)
UK Andy Tillison: keyboards, cameo vocals (you might know Andy from The Tangent and PO90)
USA
Mark Lee Fletcher:
vocals
Pete Prown: guitar
(you might
know Pete from Guitar Garden)
Jay Schankman:
keyboards
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 which has long since been discarded) (or has it? only Iris Murdoch knows...). 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 more than 25 years now. Most of this album is a perhaps muddled journey through my different conceptions of love. Love is the ultimate catharsis. Says who?
What better to start off an album of love songs than with an anti-love song? 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. In fact, I must thank Mr. May for the effects pedal that he developed and that I use. But never mind, he's an astronomer now. Andy Tillison redid a lot my crappy tracks, and made it sound as great as it does now!
Vocals: Hugo Flores
Keyboards & bass: Andy Tillison
Drums: Bruno Capelas
The rest: Fred Lessing
Jude Law in 'ExistenZ'
I'd never written any remotely heavy-sounding tune before, so this was quite a challenge for me. Incidentally, I wrote a good deal 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: Paulo, Pete and Luca, you ROCK!
Note that this track uses an MP3 file as a base track as we lost all the original tracks in a thunderstorm! Hopefully your ears won't be able to tell the difference ;-)
Clarinet: Maria João Tavares
Drums: Bruno
Pikul: Don Allen
Solos by:
Pete Prown (guitar)
Paulo Chagas (sax)
Luca Calabrese (flugelhorn)
The miserable rest: Fred Lessing
Warblers (if you can can spot 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 wife and I would talk incessantly about our very different but compatibly bleak childhoods, probing for a common past - you see, a major challenge in any relationship is to come to grips with the fact that our partners 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'.
Sax: Paulo Chagas
Drums: Bruno Capelas
Bass guitar: Luís Estorninho
Everything else: Fred Lessing
Ourica Valley, Morocco
Honestly, that's where I wrote the song, and much of the lyrics. I recorded this version fresh and anew for All Tomorrows. Jay Schankman's keyboards add a very special atmosphere to this, which I tried to mirror on the flute.
Drums: Bruno Capelas
Keyboards: Jay Schankman
Everything else, even King Kong: Fred Lessing
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. Or still am, but I wouldn't know now, would I? Thomas Olsson's mad and simultaneously entrancing guitars are simply fantastic – mind you, Mr Olsson is a musicologist at the University of Lund, and does obscure things for Swedish prog giants Isildurs Bane. Thomas and I became friends back in 2003 at the Gouveia Art Rock festival, and we have been making music together ever since. Incidentally, we're currently working on a more experimental project called 'Chairmen of the SmörgasBored', which comprises poems of mine illustrated by us playing a variety of instruments.
March 2011: we gave up on the original version as it was simply too sloppy. Thomas Olsson dragged in Mats Johansson of Isildurs Bane, and together they rearranged the entire song into an amazing audio play! Now, THAT's one cool track!!! If you want to listen to the original version, you can find it in the Downloads section.
Electric guitars: Thomas Olsson
Keyboards: Mats Johansson
Drums and percussion: Bruno Capelas
Bass guitar: Luís Estorninho
The derisory rest: Fred Lessing
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 great song with some funk to it!
Vocals: Mark Lee Fletcher
Keyboards, drums & bass: Andy Tillison
Saxophone: Paulo Chagas
The measly rest: Fred Lessing
It does rain 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... Our daughter most certainly does when we play this live! Anyway, this started off as an instrumental, but then Hugo Flores added his vocals using a poem of mine. Incidentally, I did not use a penny whistle – that's my dear old baroque treble recorder.
Vocals: Hugo Flores
The Buddhist monk: Delay Lama
Additional keyboards: Andy Tillison
The feeble remainders: Fred Lessing
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. Which I had, because 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, HP etc. I was rather disheartened by the endless rows of totally identical suburban homes in strange, silent estates all in white and black, with every home and every garden looking exactly the same, and all those young couples also looking exactly the same: former rebels now turned middle-class, Sting-like attire and hair styling, all with a sizable bunch of little kids that equally resembled 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.
Mark Lee Fletcher: vocals
Fred Lessing: acoustic and rhythm guitar, vocals, flute, recorder, coconut shawm
Bruno Capelas: drums
Fernando Guiomar: electric guitar
Luís Estorninho: bass guitar
Paulo Catroga: piano, synths, minimoog, mellotron
Andy Tillison: Hammond organ
Adriano Pereira: clarinet
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.
Mark Lee Fletcher: vocals
Bruno Capelas: Drums
Luís Estorninho: Bass guitar
Jay Shankman: keyboards
Andy Tillison: additional keyboards &
backing vocals
Fernando Guiomar: lead guitar
Fred Lessing: what little else there is
The Orion constellation
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 best, 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. And THEN, if you're lucky, the moment comes to let go. No need for God here.
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 Chagas for using only parts of his sax.
Fred Lessing: lead vocals, flute, recorders, guitars, percussion & ethnic instruments
Inês Lessing: female choir
Bruno Capelas: drums
Luís Estorninho: bass guitar
Paulo Catroga: keyboards, vocals, vocoder
Adriano Pereira: clarinet, vocals
Fernando Guiomar: lead guitar
Paulo Chagas: flute, saxophone
Andy Tillison: Hammond organ
