Ella Brown, our new three-track single

We were watching a documentary the other night about Brian Eno and he talked about the idea of releasing a song being akin to setting something free. Well, Ella Brown, our three-track single, has been free to roam for a week today. We thought we'd tell you all about it!

Ella Brown
The title track is a love song of sorts. It's about being young, and feeling that you're falling in love with someone who happily lets you admire, adore and even worship them, but doesn't give you much by way of return. Many of us have been there, and it's about learning from that, and moving on.

Ruth wrote the song and we arranged it together for our voices, and ukulele, violin, mandolin and melodica (the latter was a wedding present from one of Marc's musician friends; we married late in 2014). The middle eight, as some of you have worked out, is loosely based on Thomas Tallis' choral work, Why Fum'th in Fight (also famously magpied by Ralph Vaughan-Williams).

Recording
We recorded the song at Catalyst Studios, St. Helens. Andy Bowes is a fantastic producer and as we hadn't spent much time in a studio before, he helped us through the whole process. We actually paid for our time in the studio with vouchers we'd received as wedding gifts!

The cover art
Ruth's colleague and friend Michelle Quinn is a fine artist whose quirky, semi post-impressionist style first caught our eye when she painted us a TARDIS-themed card for our wedding. We asked how she'd feel about painting a picture for our single cover and she agreed! We were chuffed when she came up with three designs for us to choose from. Initially, we preferred one of her other designs, however, when it came time to put out the single, we unanimously changed our mind; how could Ella Brown be represented by anything other than this painting?

The violin
The violin Ruth plays on Ella Brown was hired from Mike Phoenix Violins in Liverpool. Ruth does have her own violin but the tone isn't particularly mellifluous, and it's more for playing at home. In fact, it was while we were in the Bluecoat in Liverpool looking for an engagement ring that we chanced upon Mike Phoenix; he offered to let Ruth play one of his violins, and she remembered how much she loved to play the instrument. However, she put it out of her mind until a few months later. Noted St. Helens indie band, The Loungs, were looking for someone to play violin on one of the tracks on their new album, and Ruth said she would do it if they couldn't find anyone else, but pointed out she was hardly Vanessa Mae, and her violin was far from a Strad. They kindly offered to hire a violin for her; she contacted Mike Phoenix to see if he could advise on where to hire a violin... he said he could loan her one, but for a minimum of three months... and that's how we ended up with this gorgeous sound on our track!



The b-sides
Reynardine is a well-known folk ballad (Roud 397); depending on who you believe it's either a spooky tale of a charming werefox, or a song about a brigand who tricks a girl into doing his bidding. We've kept our arrangement simple, partly because we think it's the latter!

When researching the song, we wondered what the lyric '"oh no, no rake am I!" he cried, "brought up on Venus' train..."' meant, so we looked into it; apparently, it means that Reynardine exclaims that he cannot be a rake - a conman, a seducer - because he was brought up in the company of women. (Certainly some of us have heard something similar to that line before; it's as if he is protesting that he's not a misogynist; how can he be? He has a mother and sisters!)

Both of our b-sides were recorded by our friend Kerry Foster. Kerry has known Ruth since their children were babies, but recently, Kerry started doing a music degree at St. Helens College, and was looking for a band to record as part of her degree. We were delighted when she asked us, and these two tracks were the result. We think she's done an amazing job!

Molly is a jig based on Molly/Polly put the Kettle on, or Jennie's Baubie, which we play on violin and melodica. It's a simple tune but we love it partly because it starts cheerfully and breezily but as it progresses, it finds some depth. Plus, there's never a moment in our house when we don't have a brew in our hands. We played straight through this live in the studio while Kerry recorded it.


Reception
So far, we've had one amazing review of our single which called it "engaging and very listenable," and said lovely things about our voices and musicianship. We've also had some fantastic comments about it on twitter and Facebook:
... all your tracks are a "declaration d'amour"...
... brightens my day, causes me to hum along, and tap my toes!
EVERYONE SHOULD LISTEN
... cracking job on the tracks...
love these folky vibes! Beautiful vocal harmonies too :)
AWESOME! It's awesome! 
Lovely! I love the melodica on Ella Brown!
... haven't stopped chanting it for days...
Beautiful people need to hear beautiful things
Lovely couple pouring their hearts into some ... folk music
I just love this track...

and our favourite:

I've just listened to Ella Brown and whilst I'm not into folk music at all... I have to say I absolutely LOVE it.

So, what do YOU think? 

Pricing and licensing
We've decided to make this track Pay What You Like. This means that you enter whatever you'd like to pay - even nothing at all - into the Name Your Price box when you click Buy Now. Obviously, when our EP, Amateur Astronomy, comes out, we will have to charge for it (though nothing exorbitant), otherwise we'd be running at a loss and be unable to afford to make any more music. But for the single, we're happy for people to pay anything or nothing at all. We've also licensed it under Creative Commons; without going into too much detail, this means that the tracks aren't copyright; so for example, if you want to make a video and you're looking for a background track, you can use any of ours from the single without having to pay a penny, providing you credit us. It's another way we're saying thank you to people for supporting our music.

What can you do?
Well, if you've made your way through this blog post, you've already done something lovely for us! But if you'd like to help even more, we would love for people to share our song on Facebook. It's a very mysterious business, getting people to "share" content over there; there are myriad blog posts about it and a tonne of research but still no one seems to completely understand what makes people click the "share" button rather than the "like" button! So we're just going to ask; it would help us greatly if you could share our posts on Facebook. On twitter, mini reviews help us an awful lot. Even just a quick tweet to say "love the new single @mossandjones" or something similar will go a long way in persuading other people to have a listen.

At the end of the day, we aren't doing this to make money (if we wanted to make money from music we'd stick with cover songs and do wedding after wedding) but at the same time, we do want people to listen to our songs, otherwise we might as well just stay at home and play them to each other and to Ruth's eight year old child. (Obviously, we do that anyway!) So if you like our music, and want us to keep making it, it's as simple as this... download it, and tell your friends about it!

Thanks for reading!
Ruth & Marc xx
(Moss & Jones)

Ruth on: releasing a single the weekend after a General Election

I'm going to try not to be too political here (I've already done all that on Facebook, and twitter) but I think most people who know me know I could hardly be described as "over the moon" about the thought of five years of majority Tory government. I think many - possibly not all, but most - of our lovely macramist fans feel similarly.

The trouble is, that for various reasons, our single was ready to release just days after the UK's general election result, and in the end, we decided to go ahead with it.

Ella Brown, the a-side (if you can say a digital download has an a-side) of our single, was in the pipeline for a very long time. In fact, the tune came to me about three years ago, before Moss & Jones even existed! I was singing traditional folk songs unaccompanied at open mic events around Liverpool, but had decided I wanted to try my hand at writing my own songs, and this was the tune I had. The new lyrics are totally different to what I had in mind at the time, and the bridge (heavily based upon Thomas Tallis' Why Fum'th in Fight?) is new, and of course, it's no longer unaccompanied. Obviously, three years is a long genesis for a song, and it's one of those songs that I've put aside and then returned to, fiddled with, arranged (with Marc) for various different instruments to see which worked best (on our recording there is melodica, ukulele and violin). We've agonised over the harmonies (was Marc's harmony too low to be loud?) and worked out which instrument to ditch when we play it live.

Not all our songs have been three years in the making, of course, but given that this one was, there was no way we were going to delay it once we had our b-sides ready.

However, we're also very aware that at the moment, the mood in many people's homes doesn't really suit a sweet but melancholy song, and more something angrily upset; a protest. Now, Ella Brown isn't a protest song at all; it's a sweet, melodic, wistful air about youthful love, and astronomy (sort of). However, Ella Brown is the song we've worked on and recorded, and to drop it at the last minute in favour of trying to quickly pen some kind of angry response to recent events would at best be a shame, at worst, seen as a cynical attempt to cash in on the recent election result in order to get new fans.

One thing we have done in the wake of the election is think about our pricing for this single. We've decided that we are going to stick with Pay What You Like, and license it under creative commons, so it can be shared around without the need for money to change hands. We're very conscious that people are skint already, and most are scared they'll be even more skint, so for the single release, we chose to make it possible for people to download it free of charge, should they so wish. Unfortunately, for the EP, we simply can't afford to do this (or we'd end up never being able to make music again) but we're still going to price it as cheaply as possible, and make streaming unlimited on Bandcamp rather than limit it to three plays before a fan has to pay.

In an odd way, releasing our single now, as planned, feels like a very small act of defiance. I'm not going to say "it's a protest in its own way" because it's not, and that's a bit insulting to those people who are protesting right now, but it certainly feels like we aren't going to let the current situation change our plans and change our music (though it may change anyway, organically, over time).

However, it's hard, because I don't think many macramists are in the mood to be particularly ebullient about music at the moment, which means fewer downloads, retweets, shares and so on. It's completely understandable too, and I'm not sure there's any way around it; we have to just accept that this isn't really a happy time in many people's lives, and people are obviously more interested in discussing politics right now than music. That said, I'm still glad we released it now, rather than waiting. Because if we'd waited, we could be waiting for five years, or even more.

And we're not going to stop making music just because of the Tories. ;)

If you'd like to listen to/download our single, it's on Bandcamp.

It's here! Ella Brown, a folk-inspired song of love, loss, and learning (with two b-sides!)

We're really happy to announce that our studio-recorded single, Ella Brown, is now available to download!

Ella Brown is an original song, written by Ruth and arranged, played and sung by both of us. It is about love, loss, and learning from both those things. It's played on the violin, the ukulele and the melodica, and there are lots of vocal harmonies! It was recorded and produced by Andy Bowes at Catalyst Studios, St. Helens, and will also appear on our forthcoming EP, Amateur Astronomy, out this summer.

On the b-side we have two tracks! Both were recorded by a talented student friend of ours, Kerry Foster, at St. Helens College. Reynardine is a classic folk song (which we play on the mandolin and accordion) about a trickster brigand (who may or may not also be a fox) and Molly, or Jennie's Baubie, is a jig, played on the violin and melodica, which most of you will recognise.

The single, with its a-side and b-sides, is totally free to download, though if you wish and are able, you can pay more to help support us in making future recordings.

You can download from mossandjones.bandcamp.com.

The cover art for the single was drawn by another talented friend of ours, an artist called Michelle Quinn.

We hope you enjoy the music and would love to hear from you about what you think!

Ruth & Marc xx

Ruth, on: listening to music with the left ear.

Marc, in our last blog post, wrote about spending eight months without listening to much in the way of music, at least, new music.

I've been lucky enough to have avoided this, but I've found something else happening to me since taking up musicianship on a "serious amateur" basis.

Until I started in Moss & Jones, although music was a huge part of my life (in terms of hearing the stuff; I rarely walked anywhere or got on a train or 'bus without my walkman/CDman/iPod/iPhone on) I rarely sought out new music; it kind of found me. I'd hear a song on the radio I liked and buy it; someone would recommend an album and I'd log into iTunes to download it; an artist I already liked would release an album and... well, you get the picture.

Also until I started in Moss & Jones, I never really thought about how the music made it from the band/musician/orchestra/soloist to my speakers. I suppose if I'd ever been asked I would have just guessed that they played a song, and someone pointed a microphone, and that was what happened. I never really paid much attention to arrangements and dynamics either; in fact, despite even having played the violin in an orchestra, so being well aware of how many different instruments can be involved in a piece of music, and how they can be introduced one by one, played at different times and so on... I never made the leap from that, to thinking of a composer, sitting down and adding all the parts together, arranging and slicing and making harmonies and so on.

I heard the music, but I never really listened.

Then I started going to open mic nights. In fact, this was pre-Moss & Jones; I'd been going to poetry open mics off and on since I was about 19 and reading my own work, but it was only when I met someone who convinced me my singing voice wasn't that awful (the Jones of Moss & Jones, in fact) that I learned some unaccompanied folk songs and sang them live instead. Obviously, in order to learn songs I had to find them and listen to them, and so began my interest in folk music, folk singers and folk bands, which expanded as time went on. My knowledge of folk started as being dimly aware that there was a bit more to it than Steeleye Span's version of Gaudete, to looking up Roud and Child Ballad numbers for songs, knowing the difference between a jig and a reel, and boring people to tears by telling them how the instrument most people associate with 'folk' (the acoustic guitar) is actually a relatively new addition, historically speaking. The more I learn about folk music, the more I realise I don't know, too, which is a heady mixture of thrilling and disconcerting.

Of course, nothing gets you a knowledge of the grass roots local music scene faster than 'touring' the local open mic nights and as such I started listening to many more local musicians than I ever had in my life. I started attending more and more gigs, and not epic sold-out arena gigs but small gigs by musicians that were well-known locally but barely heard of elsewhere. I discovered music via Soundcloud and Bandcamp which didn't have a hope of making it into the top 40 (or the top 200) but suited my tastes down to the ground.

But as time went on, something else started to happen too. The more I started to write music for Moss & Jones, and certainly after we visited Catalyst Studios for the first time, the more I started to notice what other people were doing in their music. I could no longer just hear a piece of music; I listened, too. I heard the arrangements in addition to the notes; it was like I had some kind aural equivalent of x-ray vision, where I could not only hear the flesh of the tune but also the skeleton it hung from. I was listening to the strings, for example, but also the point where they came in, how one violin would come in first, then another, then another in harmony, and so on, and where they'd leave, either suddenly, or one by one. I'd feel excitedly jarred by a surprising chord progression, and wonder what the musician had done. I'd get ideas; often for ways I could change or add to our own songs, but sometimes things I definitely didn't want us to do, too.

At gigs, not only would I be enjoying the gig and the stagecraft - I'd also be learning. I'd see how they got the audience involved at a certain point, and would turn to Marc and say, "we should do that", or occasionally, "we don't do that... do we?"

And it is still like that, now. I cannot listen to a piece of music without an ear to how it's been put together, and I can't go to a gig without applying it to our gigs; even if the genre is vastly different to our own. Even listening to the trance music I danced to in my early twenties, I analyse how it builds up and think of how that could be applied to a song or two of ours, for example, and there has been more than one occasion on which I've been listening to an indie tune I loved in my youth and thought "this should really be shorter. The last minute is just filler. Let's not do that with our songs". At the same time as I've fallen more deeply in love with music, I've also become a little more critical too.

But for all this, my love of music is never spent. It's just that I seem to be enjoying it in a far more analytical way than I ever did previously. I've even looked a little into the neuroscience and philosophy behind music; never too old to learn! Although I can no longer just hear and enjoy music without thinking about it, I certainly appreciate it an awful lot more, and am in awe of musicians even more than ever. I realise that "left brain versus right brain" is a false dichotomy, but for illustrative purposes, it would be fair to say, I'm listening now much more with my left ear.

Marc on...my eight months without music

A year ago I stopped listening to music. This wasn’t a sudden thing; I didn’t decide one day to ‘kick’ music, like I’d kicked cigarettes, or Twixes or going on cookdandbombd during working hours. I just gradually reached a point where I didn’t have any music on my mp3 player and didn’t listen to any during the working day.

I still came into contact with music, of course – you can’t be married to a gifted and knowledgeable musician without hearing a lot of good music on a daily basis, but as of one year ago, I stopped listening to, consuming, or buying music.

This development came as something of a surprise to me, and a worrying one at that. From my first listen to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band aged 11, I had been powerfully obsessed with music; initially with sixties pop and rock, then prog, then the guitar bands of the nineties, then classical and krautrock and chart pop and chanson and dub and baroque and … pretty much everything I came into contact with.

From the age of 15 I bought monthly music magazines, and the weekly ones as well for a good few years. Not a month would go by without me buying at least two albums and my ears were pretty much constantly ringing from persistent listening to an ever-changing selection of music on my ipod.

So what was it that caused one of the abiding passions of my life to wane?

It seems to me now that a variety of factors was at play: in 2005 an old interest re-entered my life: Doctor Who. Fandom being what it is, a pretty fearsome range of magazines, podcasts, blogs and forums became available and I was (and to a large extent still am) immersed in this. Podcasts like Radio Free Skaro and Toby Hadoke’sWho’s Round became permanent fixtures on my mp3 player, and my monthly purchases of The Word (RIP), Mojo or Record Collector were supplanted by Doctor Who Monthly.

Another change in my life was that, as of about six years ago, I started taking writing seriously (or at least trying to). As I’ve written more and more comedy and looked further into how to be good at this, I’ve found Stuart Goldsmith’s Comedians’ Comedian podcast an invaluable learning aid. Each week Stuart interviews a different stand-up about their writing methods and views on comedy. Additionally, since being lucky enough to be asked to do some ‘additional material’ writing on Radio 4’s The News Quiz and The Now Show, both these shows have been added to the weekly download list.

Adding all those up, it doesn’t leave much time in the week (or space on the mp3 player) to listen to music. This element of the situation isn’t something I regret; when I’m walking around on my lunchbreak, I’m not listening to Hex Enduction Hour for the seventieth time – I’m learning how to be better at something I want to be good at.

The question remains, though: I wasn’t listening to my old albums over and over again any more, but what was stopping me looking for new music? This, I think, is where there’s been some kind of fundamental change in me. Simply put: I used to care about What Bands Did, but I don’t any more.

There are, of course, exceptions to this: I made my first music magazine purchase in three or four years yesterday to read the Blur interview in Mojo and I avidly keep up with any news on Beatles reissues, bootlegs, biographies etc. But the part of me which would have cared that the original line-up of the Thirteenth FloorElevators is re-forming for a gig in Austin this summer is, if not dead, then certainly dormant.

Blur and The Beatles are both old bands, though. Didn’t I want to hear any NEW music? It seemed not. Whereas in the past I’d have Youtube’d a new song praised by Pitchfork, or taken up friends’ recommendations, for almost a year I just…didn’t.

I know, to my occasional shame, that there is ridiculous novelty and startling new music out there and I’m not bothering my soon-to-be-thirty-nine-year-old arse to find out about it. Perhaps all this is a function of aging: at this time of my life, I’d rather write thousand-word blog articles about there being no good music than use the very computer I’m sitting at RIGHT NOW to find some.

In summary, podcasts took the place of music in my daily listening and I didn’t bother to look for new music to be excited by.

One question which people might ask, arising from this, is: ‘How can someone playing in a committed, active musical group just stop listening to music?’ The answer is: I don’t know. Not listening to music in no way affected the high level of enjoyment I get out of playing, performing and recording with Moss & Jones. It would be neat (in the non-Californian sense) to be able to say being in a band while not listening to music made being in a band in some way experientially different but that wasn’t the case. I loved playing music in Moss & Jones when I was a raging harmoniaphile and I loved it when I wasn’t.

As you may have gathered from some of the tense-jumbling in this piece, my amusical days are now behind me. For the past four or so months, I’ve been listening to music again, and enjoying it. The catalysts for this have been…

a.) Last November, someone very generously gave us a car. I commute to work in said car at least one day per week and, given that I’ve not mastered the jiggery-pokery necessary to hook the mp3 player up to the stereo, I’ve been relying on the vehicle’s cd player, and my long-discarded crop of cds.

I can remember the first one of these I put on in the car, in a ‘God, I hope I still like music’ way: Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book. I’d bought this years ago but never listened to it all the way through. Now, hearing it through reasonably good speakers at a time when I had forty minutes to do nothing but listen (and drive), was pretty much the ideal circs for reacquainting myself with enjoying music.

I wonder, in fact, if listening to so many compressed mp3s through cheap, hissy earphones was part of what put me off music in the first place? A podcast through crackly earphones is bearable, a favourite album is not.

b.) Over the past five or so months, a few of my musical faves have reappeared with new albums, giving me the incentive of hearing something ‘new’ while also knowing it’s something I’ll very probably like. A part of my soul rebels at typing those words: I used to pretty much despise people who only wanted to listen to stuff they already knew they’d like. I think at the moment, though, that new music by artists I’m familiar with is a good way of easing myself back into new music in general.

For the record, the music in question has been Half Man Half Biscuit’s Urge ForOffal, what I’ve heard so far of Blur’s forthcoming The Magic Whip and the utterly wonderful You and I Alone by Daphne and Celeste (if you’re not with me re that last choice, go and give their debut album a listen: 7/8ths of it is fantastic).

So, now I like music again. HOORAY! Looking back to that time, though, the notion that I’d somehow lost the ability to enjoy listening to music was a genuinely frightening one and I’m very grateful that that it seems to have passed.

One thing remains: the thing I most want to hear in all the world of music is Ridiculous Novelty. THAT’S what I miss, and it’s been a long time since something’s hit me like that. So, dear reader, this is open to you: What can I listen to that will surprise the FUCK out of me?

Our folk music special: now available as a podcast!

Last Sunday, we sat down at half past eight with the internet radio tuned to Studio 109 Live and Online, ready to hear our very own radio show, full of a diverse range of talent from mostly local (one or two not-so-local) folk and folk inspired musicians. We live-tweeted the whole thing for anyone who was listening, and it was wonderful to see many of the artists featured tweeting to each other, and checking out each other's oeuvre. It's heart-warming to think that perhaps we've introduced some talented musicians to others, and possibly even helped people make new friends!

It was such a fun thing to put together, and we like to think that perhaps some people have a few new favourites now as a result!

If you missed it, the good folks at Studio 109 have kindly put it online as a podcast so you can listen to our show again in its entirety! We'd love to know what you think, especially of the first track, Ella Brown, which will be the lead single from our forthcoming album, Amateur Astronomy, out later this spring.

Studio 109 Live and Online - Folk Music Special - Moss and Jones by Studio109 Live And Online on Mixcloud

Our very own folk show THIS SUNDAY on Studio 109!

If you can, cast your minds back to December 2014, when our Christmas carol, A Song for Mary, was played on BBC Radio Merseyside and other local radio stations and podcasts, featured in the Liverpool Echo and even won a carol competition; one of the radio stations that played our carol was Studio 109. Studio 109 is a fantastic internet radio station for new music coming out of the North West and beyond. You can find them online, and also by using the TuneIn app on a smartphone.

Well, after they'd kindly featured our carol, the lovely folks at Studio 109 got in touch with us early this year and asked if we'd like to do a folk show for them. We debated whether or not it was something we could do; we'd never put together anything like this before. We were worried too; what if we asked for tracks but received too many and had to whittle them down, and risk disappointing or upsetting people? What if the musicians we did contact said no? How would we even go about putting such a show together? Of course, we said yes in the end, and decided we'd learn as we went along.

After researching podcasting, we learned that we could use good old Audacity to put together our show. We then set about looking for music to play. The only stipulations given by Studio 109 were that the music had to be original, and folk. Obviously, with a lot of music in the folk tradition being an artist's own interpretation of age-old songs, we've taken "original" in these cases to mean "an original interpretation". We decided that we'd try to make the show from local folk musicians where we could, but if we heard something amazing from further afield, we wouldn't leave it out. It made sense to include songs we listened to quite a lot at home; we also tried to make it so that the show had a wide range of instruments.

The show will be played this Sunday; the radio show itself starts at 8.30pm and our segment will start just before 9pm.

Musicians featured include:
Laura James and the Lyres
The Lost Lad
Elly the Folk
Under a Banner
Katie Rose
Pennman
Finch and the Moon
Derek King
Caitlin Gilligan
Merry Hell
Janey Turner
SheBeat
Laura & Claire

... and of course, Moss & Jones, with two tracks from our forthcoming mini-album, Amateur Astronomy.

We'd just like to say thank you to all the artists who agreed to let us use their tracks, and who got back in touch with us so quickly. We can't wait to hear your thoughts on the show this Sunday!