Lullaby

Have you all got your newsletters? Remember you can sign up to our mailing list for all the latest Orchard news by emailing us at info@orchardtales.com or our management company at info@justartistmanagement.com. Anyway, I digressed from this weeks hot topic yesterday but today we're back on track with more information about our new songs.

"Lullaby" has a darker, more ethereal sound than "Edward" and "Firewood". We've tried to capture the idea of the hinterland between experience and belief, knowledge and courage. It's in this space between the objective and the subjective that creativity, soul and your sense of self grow yet it is often a place where battles of heart and mind take place. I think of this place as a dreamlike, enriching world fraught with pitfalls and danger and yet at the same time alive with beauty and possibility. What do you think?

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Carpe diem Alice

In the second installment of my "introduction to our new song series" (note to self: must think of catchier titles) I thought I'd give you the low down on “Firewood”.

Well, this is more of an upbeat track but it's story is one that is never far from my mind. It is so easy to fall into the trap of thinking of the future and forgetting to live in the present, of thinking how things should be in order to have a good life and not realising that life is good right now.

It's a bit like Alice in Wonderland when you think about it. We spend all our time thinking about the exciting, wonderful or heart wrenching things that may be behind the door labelled "FUTURE". We hope we will have become the person we always dreamt of being and have the life we always wanted or we worry that we will still be sad. But we are always too big or too small to fit through the door, no matter what we do we just can't sneak a peek so we just carry on daydreaming. And all the while, the world continues to turn, we continue to breathe, and love, and sing never realising that things are good just the way they are.

Cast adrift on a new song

So, I thought it would be good to kick off this blog with a little bit about our music. I'm sure we'll be rambling on about our influences and so on at some point but to start with I just wanted to chat about our new tracks. I always love hearing about where ideas for songs come from so i thought some of you might be interested too.

Life has a horrible habit of letting you down. One day you're sailing along in utter bliss thinking that everything is on course, even if somewhere in the depths of your heart something is not quite right you are sure that you are doing exactly what you want to do. You're happy, the world is in order and you know exactly where you're going and then all of a sudden a gust of wind rips your map from your hands and capsizes your boat. All seems lost, you free fall through the water certain that everything is over. Then a pure, perfect calm descends, time seems to slow and you realise you can swim. Eventually you find yourself wading ashore somewhere better than where you ever intended to be. It was with this feeling in mind that "Edward" was written: sometimes not getting what you want can be the best thing that ever happened to you.

Well I'll leave you with that thought for today. So go and listen to "Edward" and let me know your thoughts on it.

Until tomorrow...

Busy bees and other news





Welcome to the Orchard Tales blog, a place full of the random, creative and beautiful thoughts that cross our minds each day. Although our number one love is music and we will be talking about our band a lot of the time, we also wanted a space to explore all our other influences; bands and books we enjoy, pockets of intense beauty in our grimy cities, art, nature and general musings on life.

Our friend McKenzie Ditter's illustration sums up our current frame of mind perfectly. We've been very busy bees over the last few months: writing new material, recording and preparing for a new year of gigs. You can listen to our four new tracks on our myspace page, let us know what you think.