Hey folks below is a brief blurb about our upcoming few shows and the details of those shows.

Like it says Finn and I are really busy saving money for L.A next year working our day jobs and using our spare time to finish our homemade double album!
The record is coming along really well, with our friends Mea and Holly finishing off some lovely harmonies in the weekend just gone.

Holly is in the duet opening for us at Happy and I’m going to ask her to sing on a song with me and Finn too. Mea has opened for us a lot and I’ve been recording her and her friends harmonies for her up coming record. One of her friends was Tessa Rain from Age Pryor and Fly My Pretties and she’s said when she’s finished her record she’s gonna come and sing on ours. Mea, Tessa and holly are all lovely songwriters with stunning voices!

My godfather Bernie will play with us again in Auckland which is kind of a ritual we have, then we go back to his place and stay up all night talking about Neil Young while his beautiful wife cooks us midnight eggs.

I’ve neglected blogging, podcasting and tube casting for the last 3 months as I’m so tied up with the record, I’m still updating my film, book and record reviews but I’m always about a month behind, so Metacritic is still a better option 

The new album has some of my deepest, slowest, saddest, sparsest, folk songs ever, and I don’t know how they’ll fit cohesively with the four full on hiphop tracks! This album should win back some of the reggae fans who found the last record too morose, as it not only has the hiphop tracks (including PARIHAKA) but a couple acoustic reggae-ish jams too. That being said it has 26 songs on it at this stage and at least 16 of them are from the very same family as the last fallen horses record so the fallen horses fans wont go hungry either.

We still can’t decide whether to make it a double album or two albums, and what the band name or names should be. It’s sort of a solo album with help, or a fallen horses outtakes record and a TOMMY b-sides record. As it won’t have the industry production values we’re not sure if we’ll even release it officially and in stores, though we will sell it through our website, I-tunes and at shows.

I don’t want to put you off though, we do truly believe in this record and think it has some of our most beautiful songs on it. We’re just not sure it’s marketable…

Namaste

tommy

Tommy and Finn (the guitar playing and singing half of Tommy and The Fallen Horses) are doing four intimate duet performances as a brief reprieve from their intensive work on the new homemade double album they’re currently slaving over to ensure release before they relocate to the U.S early next year!

Wellington Happy Aug 20th
Includes a full band set and support from Very Nice Treehouse

Auckland One 2 One Sep 10th
With support from Bernie Griffen and Guest

New Plymouth Matinee Sep 11th

Tokomaru Bent Horseshoe Café Nov 6th

I’m writing at work feeling like death after a brilliant first weekend of The Alternative Country Tour which I’m doing just with my young guitarist ‘Curious Finn’.

My mum just TXT’d me asking how it went and knowing she’s an appreciator of irony I wrote:

5hrs slp 3 nites in a row, 22 hrs drivin, shattered windscreen on the desert road, lost money, but actually a lot betr thn average J

The funny thing is the above TXT is all true and it wasn’t until I TXT’d mum that I even thought about how much had gone wrong, or could be perceived to be undesirable. The reality is we did have a brilliant weekend with two really good shows and that’s the only thing I’ve held in my mind and heart about the weekend.

Now you could look at this as being a sad state of affairs that things are going so badly that a weekend with so many adverse factors could be considered a success by my disturbingly low standards. But the way I see it is that it’s more a demonstration of my love of music, my optimism and my ability to transcend adversity.

Finn and I Performed better than we have since the amazing summer shows and had much more fun on stage than I’ve had in quite a while (which means that we told lots of story’s and got heckled by the drunks for talking too much). The audiences were all incredibly supportive and passionate and the energy in the room was so respectful and attentive that it felt akin to reverence. Not necessarily from the audience for us but from all of us for music itself.

Making good time on the desert road by my characteristically speedy haphazard, but very safe, driving, I was overtaking a huge truck in a tight spot on the desert road when the sound of a shotgun blast filled my ears and my windscreen transformed from being a bug stained window into the outside world into a debilitating spider web of fractal glass patterns! So here I am driving 120k on the wrong side of the road with a truck to my left so I can’t pull over with a limited stretch of road in front and with no visibility!

I managed to break and pull in behind the truck and found 3 little fractal gaps that I could maintain about 10 % visibility through and decided that my only option to make it to the gig in Auckland that night was to keep on going. So I made sure I stayed behind the truck which I could see more clearly than the subtle nuances of the actual road.

It’s funny how your expectations slowly disintegrate when in a slowly unfolding disaster. One night when I was 19 Mat and I lost a car in the middle of the ocean and it took about 4 hours for our thoughts to go from;

1) We’ll dig this car out of the sand in a few minutes and Ben will never know we borrowed his mums car.

2) We’ll find some wood to wedge under the car wheel in 10 minutes get back to the car and get it out in 20 minutes and be home and stop shivering in an hour and Ben will never know we borrowed his mums car.

3) We’ll get home in 1 hour back to the car with some hung-over sleepy men, a van and a tow rope 30 minutes after that, dig the car out and tow it to the road and get home in 2 hours max and stop shivering and rest our aching mussels and get some sleep. And if Ben’s still passed out and locked in the shed then he will never know we borrowed his mums car.

4) The fire engine will come and tow out this car before the waves actually start getting in the car doors and destroy the upholstery and we will stop aching, shivering and dry retching and get plasters for our hands and change into dry clothes in 3 hours and if Ben…

5) The waves are crashing over the roof of the car and its obviously completely destroyed and will need replacing, the firemen are sending me to dive into the seaweed congealed water to attach this hook under the car, and here comes Ben marching down the beach ready to bash the shit out of us as 30 early morning joggers look on at us disheveled wretched hippies shivering in the dawn.

Similarly as I drove behind this truck my thoughts went from.

1) I’ll drive like this to Auckland and get it replaced there in a few minutes.

2) Oh what about cops… this will take me 30 minutes to get replaced in Taupo and cost 150 bucks and maybe AA will pay for it

3) This will cost me realistically about 300 or 400 bucks and take 2 hours to sort out and I’ll be late to sound check in Auckland and AA wont pay for it.

4) I’ll get pulled over by the cops fined 200 bucks before I get to Taupo which AA will take 3 hours to drive me to where I’ll spend 2 hours walking round only to find that no one actually has a replacement window and that they’ll need to courier one which wont arrive till Monday and will cost 500. In order to get to Auckland at all I’ll need to spend another 500 hiring a car which will need returning Monday when I pick up the van which will lead to taking a day off work and I have no leave left, plus I’ll get to Auckland an hr after we need to start playing and still have an hour of setting up the PA to do in front of a grumpy audience.

What actually happened was I hid close behind the truck and the 2 cop cars I passed didn’t notice my window was an oil painting and I made the bizarre last minute decision to veer of the road much too fast to stop off in Turangi (the first tiny town after the desert) and see what they knew. It’s another long story to describe the bizarre events in this little town and this crazy glass operation small business that I discovered but the upshot is that I unwittingly found the only available Econovan windscreen in the whole mid north island (including the mobile operations) and had I kept on, as I’d intended, to Taupo, option 3 above would have likely been the actual outcome.

I made it to Auckland an hour late to sound-check (which was 3 hours before the show so fine) and 300 bucks down. So for a bummer the whole thing was rather interesting and pleasant and despite my thoughts gradual descent into catastrophe I actually maintained a rather light emotional equilibrium and found myself interested by the unfolding scenario rather than panicked or frustrated.

As for the driving well that’s just part of operating as a musician at a lower level. We can’t afford to fly, hire town cars or taxi and hire a PA so we drive and bring our own

PA. I love driving through the beautiful New Zealand countryside this is Aotearoa driving round isn’t such a bad thing.

The sleep thing is a bit hard though, I get to sleep between 2 and 3 most nights on tour (and the night before a tour) and yet still wake up at 7 and can’t get back to sleep, plus I cant sleep during the day so I don’t nap later on. Finn on the other hand sleeps most nights for a good 7 hours and then sleeps for another 5 hours each day while I drive us off to the next town, lucky bastard!

This weekend leg of our tour only lost money because of the windscreen expense otherwise it would have pretty much broken even.

The thing is when you perform a thing that you feel deeply connect to in a deeply connected way in-front of people who also feel connected to you and the music, all the other considerations are irrelevant. You know beyond any shadow of a doubt that you’re where you should be, doing what you were born to do and when you feel that way you know that you are who you’re meant to be and that no matter what else, that is beautiful thing.

Which is strange because it’s not like since the advent of TV I find myself wondering about the relevance of books. Especially strange in that I’ve always considered myself a writer more than a musician so therefore these intentionally designed and edited BLOGS should in theory for me seem more resonant with my abilities than the spontaneous improvised film and audio mediums. Maybe that’s the crux of the issue though: that as a writer I don’t edit much, I write in stream of consciousness and hold some funny issue-like belief that to edit and revise (other than my appalling grammar and spelling) is in some way a cop out. Not because it implies that I wasn’t talented enough to get it right the first time but more because it reveals a self censorship symptomatic of a self consciousness that I don’t want in my psyche, let alone in my writing. That being said, it’s not like I feel there would be anything particularly evolved or useful about printing my every mundane thought as I write and also I suspect that part of the reason for having this belief that ‘its inauthentic to edit’ is to mask the fact that I’m too lazy to do it, or if not lazy maybe just that the thought of editing is the one thing that triggers my predominantly dormant inner-perfectionist. At the thought of editing (and therefore mixing an album too) this aspect of me, that plays no roll in my creative process, or my day job, or my tidying the house, or my relationships, or anything else really, springs up and says “well if you’re going to take the time to make it right you have to make it absolutely perfectly right, and that’s too hard and will take too much time”. That stops me dead in my tracks and I just either quit or publish it as is (as you can see by my unedited podcasts and previous blogs).

One of my techniques for getting present, and transcending debilitating self-consciousness and falseness is to name my insecurity or fear or anxiety. This is why so many of my podcasts, blogs and Tubecasts are about actually the act of what I’m doing and how I’m feeling about it and what I’m thinking about it. Now whether or not that makes for a gripping experience for the Tommy-frequenting public or not is a fact that remains to be seen but it does leave me free to be myself more than if I tried to push it to the side.

I’ve been thinking recently about some of my more recent blogs and the responses I’ve had to them (some were comments I published and some people wrote me emails) it seems I’ve inadvertently gotten people to pity me which is so unfair for the poor suffering masses out there with genuine issues and in genuine need of pity. Well no one probably benefits much from being pitied so perhaps ‘need’ isn’t the right term but certainly there are folks out there who far better justify the response.

I on the other hand go to bed almost every night feeling grateful for my life and wake up happy and excited. I don’t like having to go to work every day and wish I had enough abundance to be able to make music and travel full time, but I think that’s part of the human experience and I don’t let my longing invade my enjoyment of my current circumstances, too much.

It’s true that my crisis of faith that I’ve written about has also caused a crisis of confidence and a crisis of aspirations and hope too, but like I always tried to preface that with I’m not actually depressed or despairing and I do believe whatever  I’m going through is a process. I wrote about it mostly as something real to express, and also because I thought others similarly experienced might take solace from the universality of the dilemma?

My current theory in terms of my crisis is that it was rational thought and scientific theory that created the doubt in my faith and experience of life and therefore maybe greater study of science will create doubt in my new ideology (which shouldn’t be hard as the new ideology is simply “I don’t know” mixed with a desire to create new understandings and make new decisions based on evidence rather than inspiration).

Watching documentaries from cutting edge scientists with different viewpoints to Dawkins has been really helpful to me in this respect and I find my old ways of looking at things coming back to me.

 Maybe the black and white spiritual ideologies that I first resonated with as a teen in early recovery may not ever return but I still believe that I had the most intuition, wisdom and natural power around that time and that all the refining that came after was useful and made me a better helper in the world, but also led me to the current state of confusion.

Ultimately I would like to believe that the whole process will invariable be revealed to me in hindsight as being essential for me and not just ‘something that I went through’ but ‘something amazing that I went through’ and I’m closer now than I’ve been in the last two years too believing that again.

I think I’m mending the broken heart that losing faith left me with, Which is a hard heart to mend. When you break up with someone, your friends and family gather round you and offer you support, whether or not you know how to accept it you are at least validated by it. Having your faith slip is so personal, so intangible so un-communicate-able and so holistic in its impact, that there’s no simple way of being offered or even being experienced or seen by your loved ones as being in need of it. Which is ironic because it was my faith in spirit that so hugely sustained my self–sufficiency and lack of interdependence on others.

I didn’t know how to express that when my clients said to me “I don’t know what to do” I’d stopped feeling a huge amount of excitement and gratitude because their not knowing represented an openness which would provide space for spirit to come in and start lovingly guiding their lives, but that now I just felt the same lost-ness as them and all I could honestly say was “I don’t know either”.
I didn’t know how to say that when people said to me “amazing show man you guys are gonna’ be huge” that my internal reaction had turned from “yes we are!” to “oh man that really bums me out, because it’s just more proof that good people can be so misguided, because I believed that too and now I don’t know, and your telling me that with such certainty  just brings home the fact that certainty isn’t a guarantee and now I don’t have guarantees or belief…”.

All these subtle changes and shifts happened in every area of my life real slowly and without much awareness on my part. Which is weird because I’ve always known, and often said, that spirit is the fundamental ballast on which all my beliefs balance and that desire to be in alignment with, and to serve, spirit is my only ambition in this life and that my most important relationship is with spirit. So it should have been obvious that to stop believing in spirit would alter my entire experience of life.  I guess the stopping believing happened so subtly and never with any finality. The closest I came to being final and the first thing that alerted me to the intensity of the change in my spiritual outlook was when I realized that my faith that I’d make it as a Muso had changed from ‘absolute’ to ‘highly unlikely’. It was my relationship to music that tipped me off to my relationship to spirit.

Even in my most zealous spiritual times I’ve always said that Truth was more Sacred to me than Love and that I would follow the truth to the ends of the earth and my lifetime, but like I recently said to a good friend about this viewpoint: I held that view on the basis that God was the Truth and that underneath all of science and rational thought and reality was the existence of a benevolent intelligence of which our eternal souls were a happy part. Had I known that the truth was its just me for 68 years in a flat working a day job cause I can’t make it as a writer I might not have been so bold to say that truth was more important than love, infact I might have said “you know truth’s not all that important at all, I prefer things like TV and cuddles”.

I guess whatever the outcome though, I laid down that incantation and I’m still committed to it. Truth remains the most important thing to me, in my relationships with my loved ones, my self and with spirit and science, and whatever measure it may represent of awareness or delusion I’m back to believing wholeheartedly that the truth will be beautiful whatever it is and that whatever it is I will be better off for my awareness of it.

To download, right click the link below and save as/save link as/save target as.

Tommy and Finn Fm p3

To download, right click the link below and save as/save link as/save target as.

Tommy and Finn Fm 2

To download, right click the link below and save as/save link as/save target as

Tommy and Finn FM p1