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In The Reeds

by Fred M-G

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1.
There Is Loss And There Is Love 08:13
lyrics
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There is Loss and there is love There is a darkness above There are words already said That could be pure sound instead There is somewhere you have gone Where you have been gladly beyond There was a time before it all When you were an animal There is a silver rippling wood There is a moment understood There is the way the body knows What you in movement know There is a house upon a hill We keep a chime by the window sill There is a man upon the cross There is his love, there is his loss It is gone And I know If I know anything That it is flown into song And I’m cast out Just to be A partner in the act Of voicing the unseen And making strange And making clear That it might come to save me Being more than you could be I felt the force of you I’ve passed trembling through And here I am born anew There is loss and there is love There is a darkness above There is you and there is me There is always a you and me
2.
Lying In The Reeds 06:19
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I’ll tell you something You gotta listen now Ray, Ray is here to stay Cos you know he means business Ray, Ray is on his way And you know damn well that he means business I was lying in the reeds by my father’s side Cos he’d told me to run and he’d told me to hide And we ran into the rushes and we knelt in prayer As a great mob swarmed on the bank up there You strung me out You swept me out You sold me out You sold me down the river Ray, Ray is here to stay Cos you know he means business Ray, Ray has got his way You know he’s coming down to take care of business I was lying in the reeds by my father’s side Cos he’d told me to run and he’d told me to hide And we ran into the rushes and we knelt in prayer As a great mob swarmed on the bank up there
3.
If I Could Say To You (ft. P. Wall) 05:18
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If I could say to you what keeps us apart If I could say to you I’d not know where to start If I could say to you across the oceans in the dark If I could say to you I wouldn’t break your heart A life is lived amiss When lived in the shade of cowardice When a future is rendered incomplete When a thought of you capsizes me as I’m walking down the street And though there’s a great sense of detachment in my life Were I to get through that, and to you, I would try If I could say to you what keeps us apart If I could say to you I’d not know where to start If I could say to you across the oceans in the dark If I could say to you I wouldn’t break your heart Most of the time I don’t find the time to think about that day But from time to time I recall again the feeling of your gaze How it made me feel like a two-sided shape How you looked at me steadily, in a certain way If I could say to you what keeps us apart If I could say to you I’d not know where to start If I could say to you across the oceans in the dark If I could say to you I wouldn’t break your heart

about

Hi, it’s Fred.

As you can probably tell from the title, ‘In The Reeds’ is something of an accompanying release to ‘In The Rain’, the album I put out in August 2022. The records are not particularly stylistically similar, but the two come from a similar headspace and a similar period of my life.

As with ‘In The Rain’, I’ve been sitting on these tracks for a long time. I already released ‘There Is Loss And There Is Love’ in 2019, and that took years to even get to that point - I started that song, in one form or another, in around 2012. ‘Lying In The Reeds’ is a cover of a track by Lone which came out in 2012, and we started doing a version of both that song and ‘If I Could Say To You’ with my band ZoZo the following year.

As with a lot of songs I wrote in this period, the material here was born from me, in one way or another, wanting to combine a sort of confessional songwriting style that is the core mode of expression of pop music since time immemorial with a sort of hyperreal kind of writing and arrangement. Specifically, I was really into the idea of writing house/house-adjacent tracks which were, in some way, about house music. This isn’t something I’d go about in the same way now, and I don’t know how successful these attempts were, but that’s how we got here. From here, I mapped out the polarities - loss, love etc. - and used the space in between to find the nuances whilst also appraising stuff going on in my own life.

(Actually, this isn’t so much the case with ‘If I Could Say To You’. I wasn’t really aiming for a house thing here, more of a William Onyeabor vibe. The lyrical world is the same though.)

As with the ‘In The Rain’ material, I’ve kept hold of this stuff for far too long. Again, I don’t make music like this any more, and while I am fond of these songs, my inability to move on from them both musically and emotionally has unfortunately soured my relationship to them a bit. Maybe I’ll come back round to them in future, but for now I’m going to put them out there, say goodbye, and try to grasp the nettle of the next phase of my musical life.

So yeah, ‘In The Reeds’. Three old (to me - they’re new to you) songs with some groove in them. Hope you like.

credits

released February 17, 2023

There Is Loss and There Is Love' written by Fred M-G
'If I Could Say To You' written by Fred M-G and P. Wall
'Lying In The Reeds' written by Lone (Matt Cutler), additional lyrics by Fred M-G

All instruments by Fred M-G except drums on 'Lying in the Reeds' (Rob Slater) and bass on 'If I Could Say To You' and 'Lying In The Reeds' (Joseph Thorpe)

'If I Could Say To You' and 'Lying In The Reeds' produced by Fred M-G, Rob Slater and Jamie Lockhart
Recorded by Fred M-G in various home studios as well as Rob Slater and Jamie Lockhart at Greenmount Studios, Leeds
Mixed by Rob Slater and Jamie Lockhart at Greenmount Studios, Leeds

'There Is Loss And There Is Love' produced and recorded by Fred M-G
Additional production, recording and mixing by Sam Smith at the Green Door Studio, Glasgow

Mastered by Dom at Declared Sound, Leeds
Cover image by Xavier Velastin

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Fred M-G Leeds, UK

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