{"id":41,"date":"2009-02-15T22:05:51","date_gmt":"2009-02-15T22:05:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/funk.co.uk\/music\/?p=41"},"modified":"2009-02-15T22:05:51","modified_gmt":"2009-02-15T22:05:51","slug":"welcome-stranger-tomorrow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/funk.co.uk\/music\/welcome-stranger-tomorrow\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome Stranger Tomorrow"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

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In 2006 I wrote and produced an album for Claire Smith, “Welcome Stranger Tomorrow”. It was a project to develop a young singer, who didn’t have lots of confidence to start with, but she did have ambition, a decent voice, and a relatively wealthy father who was prepared to invest in his daughter’s future. As well as introducing Claire to writing techniques and studio craft, we arrived at a collection of warm, melodic songs, which though it remains unreleased and has not been professionally mastered, bears repeated listening and hangs together well as a live set or an album.<\/p>\n

\"\"The only way I have ever found to grow newly emerging talent is to spend a lot of time trying things out and experimenting to see what feels natural, and then within that, see what might work live in front of an audience and be commercial.<\/p>\n

The problem with pop is that it demands instant in-your-face success, and that demand sucks the life blood from subtlety and grace and inspires copycat banality.<\/p>\n

My writing partner and sometimes co-producer Mark Crook and I steered a course away from these pitfalls and in the end, developed Claire from a 16 year old willing but naive songwriter to a young woman capable of sustained original output.<\/p>\n

My personal favourite is (selfishly!) the song I wrote with Claire’s white soul voice in mind, sung in falsetto on the demo, “Wouldn’t Do That” – a song which comes totally from my own experiences at the time but which seemed to synch up with Claire’s own early adult preoccupations. Either says a lot about my level of maturity, or that like everyone else, I am still learning and growing.<\/p>\n

Claire is currently in her third year of an English degree and continues to play and sing live.<\/p>\n

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In 2006 I wrote and produced an album for Claire Smith, “Welcome Stranger Tomorrow”. It was a project to develop a young singer, who didn’t have lots of confidence to start with, but she did have ambition, a decent voice, and a relatively wealthy father who was prepared to invest in his daughter’s future. As …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[45,65,98,193,128],"class_list":{"0":"post-41","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-pop","7":"tag-claire","8":"tag-female","9":"tag-melodic","10":"tag-pop","11":"tag-soft","13":"without-featured-image"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/funk.co.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/funk.co.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/funk.co.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funk.co.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funk.co.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/funk.co.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/funk.co.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funk.co.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funk.co.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}