Mini post

Just a little short one  :)

We had a really productive meeting with the lovely and very very talented Badcore horns yesterday. They listened through to the songs and my ideas and came up with some brilliant ideas as well for songs that I hadn't come up with ideas for so all in all I am very excited now about getting the horn parts all recorded. I realise I said the word ideas waaaaaay too many times in that sentence :)

Today I wrote a zombie song! Can't wait to record it, very pleased :)

The year begins

So, January and February are pretty much non-months as far as I'm concerned. They sort of fly by in a cold and dark way and not much happens during them. So March for me is what I consider to be the proper start of the year.

The Lena Smith Band kicked off the year with a gig at the roundabout pub. It was a for a brilliant cause; the 5 mountains for 5 years festival event which was raising money for men's cancer charity Orchid.  We had a great time and hung around for a bit after our set and got to see a brilliant new band called Horse around Home, I thoroughly recommend checking them out because they were absolutely brilliant.

I say that we haven't really been getting up to much during January and February but we have actually been working away on the guitar recording for the album at  Beliefspace Studio.  It's very nearly finished and sounding excellent.

Next on the list is recording the Brass and String sections on some of the songs. I have been writing away which has been brilliant, I don't have as much time as I'd like usually to sit down with pencil and manuscript paper and write music in that way. I absolutely love doing it as well so I have really enjoyed writing all the parts for the brass and strings. Next week the Badcore horns are coming in for a meeting about it all. Very exciting!

I did actually have one solo gig booked for the beginning of February but a small person sneezed all over me at work and so I was out of action for a week with the Flu and had to cancel (sad times) but luckily the B-Bar were most excellent about it and I have another one booked there for the 4th of April which I am very excited about (Happy times).

One of the reasons I am very excited about this is that I have been working hard on learning all my own lyrics. I appreciate that this sounds a bit stupid, you'd think that when you write songs you'd know your own lyrics but not me, I've always got a bit muddled with my words so I've spent some time really learning them and I've also been learning a few little cover songs to stick into my solo sets which I find very exciting. Exciting and a little scary but mostly exciting :)

Last week I wrote a new song which I hadn't done for a few months, what with all the recording, my songwriting has taken a bit of a back seat. It's always lovely when a new one comes out and I'm very happy with this one. It's called 'On my mind' and you can hear a live zoom recording of it here .

At the weekend, Welshy and I took a little visit to London to go to the 'Inside Abbey Road Lecture' We saw lots and lots of amazing things, and it was so exciting to be in a place where so much amazing music has been created and where so many talented and inspirational musicians have been.

(Some random old men crossing the Abbey Road crossing)

Next up band wise is Volksfest which I can't wait for, we're on on Sunday 26th Time TBC and we'll hopefully be doing some of our more recent songs.

So lots and lots to be excited about :) Yay!!!

Thank you for reading

Lena xxxxxx