In an age where computer algorithms are dictating the music we listen to, and artificial intelligence is beginning to write its own songs – can we remember the deeper power of music for building community?
Listen to James Frost’s music on your favourite streaming service.
Once upon a time, music was less about the revered performer – high up on a stage in adulation of the audience – and more about welcoming the spirit of community and creativity alive in us all.
Like the bards of old that travelled from town to town, with stories and music to share. Or the voices around fires or in drinking houses, making merry with song. Or the town choirs, lifting our hearts at the turning of the seasons.
Concert
In making my new album, I set about testing whether this approach of community participation and creative collaboration could still be relevant today – tapping into a network of grassroots support and involving hundreds of people in the process.
Without a record label offering a loan, every independent artist faces the same question: how am I going to fund my music?
Crowdfunding has become the modern form of artistic patronage – a way to support musicians by investing in their work upfront and receiving the music later – a ‘pay it forward’ scheme.
So at the start of the project, I launched a crowdfund appeal and humbly came online to ask for help. It’s a vulnerable act, a radical act, to wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve and ask the community for support. But in that vulnerability, Life responds and things start happening.
I promised to make a beautifully recorded album full of meaningful, uplifting songs… and people started donating. I also offered gifts and rewards (us musicians will do whatever it takes!) such as: I will call you on your birthday and sing you a song down the phone (for £100); I will come to your front door and play a concert in your home or garden (£300); I will write and record an original song, especially for you (£750).
Communities
In all, over 400 people backed my album before I’d even recorded a note, raising over £16,000 – placing community support at the centre of the project, from the very beginning.
I decided my album would be called All Of Our Hands – it was one of the songs for the album and one of my favourite tracks when I played live. But it is also the essence of crowdfunding … by each lending a hand, the whole vision is carried.
Something about making albums (or writing books or creating art) requires the artist to step out of the comfort zone, grapple with the edges of what they know, and go beyond it.
In my case, with the goodwill of hundreds of people behind me, and the money to seed an artistic vision, I decided to quit my job, leave everything behind and set off on a musical pilgrimage.
Many people had booked house concerts which led to performances in front rooms, backyards, birthday parties, private beaches, and after-hour bars … from Glasgow to Pembrokeshire, Totnes to central London… enabling me to meet new communities up and down the land. How intimate it is to be welcomed into people’s personal spaces, filling them up with life, song and stories – every concert different to the last.
Musicians
And through the connections I made on the road, I was invited to play at Glastonbury Festival, Secret Garden Party, Folk East and lots of other fabulous festivals that England curates so well.
I was following my nose, living at the kindness of strangers, housesitting, subletting, and sleeping in the back of an old Estate car. For the first time in my life, I was nomadic – following an invisible thread of kindness that led me from place to place.
It was a network of patronage and exchange that I had not experienced before. I stayed in million pound houses in Greenwich and tiny shepherd’s huts in Wales. Many who offered me their homes had connected with my music or seen me perform live and felt like they knew me already, as my voice accompanied them in their lives.
And along the way I recorded musicians that I met on my travels, piecing together the album like a patchwork quilt. I recorded a live band in Bristol, saxophone players in Brighton, folk musicians in Suffolk and pianists in Dartmoor. Piece by piece, the album took shape, with a few additional instruments being added by an international network of musicians online, by percussionists in Columbia, producers in Los Angeles and banjo players in Nashville.