On voice memos
and how they tell you who you were and are
Have you ever gone through your old voice notes on your phone? I recommend it. There’s some weird stuff in there – I came across strange musings I’d made to myself, half-sung, half-lyrics that sound like a haunted child. Musty sounds when I was playing around with different tunings (inspired by Laura Marling’s guitar tutorials during lockdown). There’s also hours-long interviews with people I’ve spoken to from across the world for my journalism – conversations I’d almost forgotten about, yet whose stories were so important and became foundations of articles. More recently, while I’ve been writing the Guardian’s sex column, my phone memory is now filled with a lot of talk about sex and people’s desires and pleasures. (I should note all of these conversations in confidence are now stored away and protected.)
I think these voice notes tell you a lot about your past, who you were then and who you are now. Only a handful of mine are named, and those that are are recordings of rehearsals. I’d only named the file so as to make it easier to find and share with bandmates. The rest, all those hundreds of them, are titled “New Recording …” And what I find most mysterious is the missing numbers. I go from New Recording 9 to New Recording 18, and I wonder which files I decided to delete and why. Who was I speaking to then and what did we talk about? Why did I deem it so irrelevant as to delete it? Their absence makes me long to know what I’ve lost.
My New Recordings up to the 30s take me to Chile in 2019. There are the sounds of protests, chants, cars bleeping. There’s the sound of Chilean folk songs sung around a table. In the New Recording 50s I’m in Abbey Road Studios, speaking to engineers who worked there in from the 60s and 70s, people whose ears heard the first sounds of the likes of Pink Floyd and Fela Kuti in the studio.
The New Recordings 90s and onwards have the sounds of the synth, drums and bass together for the first time, as the band first started rehearsing together in the summer of 2021. I have so many recordings of rehearsals and it’s amazing to see how songs grow, change, get better or worse and then get better again.
I’ve also got so many skeletons of songs. I found the backbones that would make the first draft, the first lines of a page, of my two EPs. There’s a beautiful sensitivity and innocence of an early song recorded on a voice memo with just an acoustic guitar and a voice. I sound timid in the way I sing and play, as if I’m still unsure of what I’m doing or trying to say.
This is Colour of Blue from 22 October 2019. I can see where I am when I recorded this. I’m in my aunty’s house in a town called Buin in Chile during their late spring. You can hear the birds singing in the background, and the almost constant bark of the neighbours’ dog. I’m playing my cousin’s battered classical guitar with old strings that have never really been played. I’m sitting outside in the little yard, and I imagine it was warm and bright, but not too hot.
Blue notes
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I’ll be playing at Fieldview festival the first weekend of August.
I’ve just uploaded the voice memo version of Colour of Blue to Bandcamp, so you can buy it if you like! Or, it’s free to paid subscribers (please message me if you’d like to have the file.)