Dear Wonderlanders, after a busy time of rehearsing, playing the festivals and then having the rest of the summer off it’s about time for an update.
We were back in the Glasshouse studios in early October armed with new ideas. Being spread around the country a bit these days means that we do a lot of passing bits of tunes, riffs and lyrics back and forth via the wonders of dropbox. Sometimes whole new songs emerge by doing that (thank you Rich for the gorgeous music to the new track we haven't yet named properly); sometimes ideas develop to a point where we need to get together to mould them into whole songs. But what we like to think of as a ‘classic’ Wonderland tune happens when a song is conjured out of the ether because we’re all in the same space at the same time. ‘Big Universe’ began on the drums. Can a drum beat be beautiful? If Stuart is playing them then we have to say, yes - definitely. Then Caroline’s bass – like a dark river snaking its way through the tiny bursts of stardust that are the notes tumbling out of Martin’s guitar. Listening…listening, the song begins to write itself; which is sometimes how it feels. The song genie appears, feeds words into my mouth and I let them spill out, rearranging them as I go.
After a day’s rehearsal we came out with 7 new songs – 5 are pretty much done and just need a bit of restructuring and fine tuning and a couple need the ‘Wonderland treatment’ to turn them into proper songs.
We’re also looking at older Wonderland tunes, so we can give them a bit of a polish and a proper outing, e.g. Shadows, Smile Inside My Soul and a handful of others.
An EP is on the cards for release sometime in spring 2019 – we just need to decide what should go on it. When it’s released we’ll be doing a couple of gigs to promote it. And we’ve decided we love playing festivals, so we hope we’ll be doing more of that next summer.
Amidst all that we’ll be sorting out putting an album together. The one we always wanted to make. And now, we can.