music Archives - WestyMusic

With the Sky

Westy — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 15:02:15 +0000

With the Sky was written in 2011, just after I checked out as a pilot. It’s had various tweaks and changes to the lyrics since then, but essentially the tune has remained the same.

I wrote it as a nod to the ballooning community, especially for those people who gave up their time for free and helped me to train to be a pilot. the majority of these belong to the British Balloon and Airship Club (BBAC), and for people in the UK, if you want to get involved with ballooning, then that’s a good place to start in terms of finding people near to you who will help you take part.

It’s very much a “pay-it-forward” community, in that it’s best to find a balloon team, help out with being part of the chase-crew, whilst you decide whether ballooning as a sport is really for you. Claire and I got involved in ballooning in 2001, and we were crew members for a number of teams until late 2007, when Claire ‘checked out’ as a pilot, and then we bought our first balloon, enabling me to train afterwards.

Essentially then, it took me nearly 4 years to train as a pilot. Partly due to the fact that I was sharing balloon time with Claire, who was still a novice pilot herself.

What I hoped to convey in the song, was life as a balloonist (or is it a “loonist?”). The fact we’re always watching the sky, looking at weather forecasts, checking out the wind speed, looking toward the tops of the trees even, in the sheer hope that the winds will be calm enough for us to fly. A lot of the time, especially when we lived in the UK (and we were up North as well….), those hopes were often dashed by turbulence, fog, and, more often, rain.

I don’t think that there’s been another song written about ballooning as such since Fifth Dimension’s “Up, Up and Away” in the 1960s. So, it’s really a modern slant on ballooning, from a pilot’s perspective. There’s no doubt in my mind, and I’ve seen significant changes in the weather since 2001, that the weather patterns are worsening. There are far less calm flyable winds since we began ballooning in the. early noughties. Some of our ballooning colleagues who’ve been flying since the 60s, 70s and 80s have said that those weather changes are even more significant since they began flying even.

So the “Give me another window in the weather” line in the song is a plea for just the chance to fly, which is becoming more and more the balloonist’s anthem, I think.

With the Sky was released on March 8th.

It’s on Spotify:

You can find the video here:

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Life, the Universe and Music…

Westy — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 16:37:00 +0000

Leading up to the release of my first few songs, I’ve decided to make some informative short documentary videos about the journey so far. Starting with the decision to make a serious effort to improve and get the music ‘out there’ that I made in early 2016.

Look out for Life, the Universe and Music on YouTube… Episode One is out NOW!

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Making videos…

Westy — Sat, 10 Sep 2022 15:52:00 +0000

This Summer of 2022 I’ve been concentrating on filming some videos to go with the songs I’ve recorded, mixed and had mastered.

The first one I’d started with was Whispers of Home, which involved the use of some discreet footage I shot from a train window on my way to King’s Cross in London, actually at the beginning of my trip to Los Angeles, after I’d won the All Guitar Vero Contest.

I decided that I’d look at some creative and cost-effective ways of making my music videos, so I have some very different ideas for all of them, some a little more ambitious than others!

The next video to have a go at has been Only the Good Ones Go First. I’ve had this idea for a long time to have a posterised approach and to make it a lyric video too with cartoon bubble text. As it looks and sounds at the moment, it’s got all the energy I was expecting, and I think it’s going to look great…

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Thinking On Your Own – Part 1

Westy — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 14:19:48 +0000

March 19th. The UK was going into lockdown with rising cases of Covid-19 being reported. The media frenzy at the time was on how people were panic-buying in the shops, with various photos and video footage of people stockpiling shopping trolleys full of toilet roll, pasta, bread, milk and other groceries, and in doing so, depriving the most vulnerable in our society.

I was angry at what I saw, and I felt I had to write a song about it. Sure, people were scared, none of us really knew how Covid was going to affect or change our lives. But, depriving others at a time of real need, was selfish and unnecessary. Global crises really show us how base and primitive the human race can still be.

It didn’t really matter to me that the song was probably just going to be labelled as ‘another from the glut of songs written in lockdown’; it was heartfelt, and I felt strongly about its message. I wanted to get across that, in isolation, we are still able to think of others and should be concentrating on them, not thinking on our own. It was asking people to consider: “Who else can I help?”

If, in listening to this song, it makes one person think again, and decide not to act selfishly, giving the more vulnerable person a chance – just for once – then it will have done it’s job.

I posted it on Facebook. I wasn’t sure what to expect really, but I asked people to like and share, and a few people did. Thank you to those who did, because what happened next was a complete surprise.

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Sound Screen

Westy — Thu, 08 Nov 2018 18:15:29 +0000

Throwback Thursday… it’s been a year since I planned and built what I now call the Sound-Screen. Around that time, I made an attempt to do some kind of explanatory video, but suffer – as many people do – from the dreaded “erms”… you’ll see from the amount of dialogue cuts in this clip. Anyway… here’s a slicker edit of that epic fail, and here’s hoping it’ll inspire someone hoping to build a home studio on a budget…

Sound Screen

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