Pete Greenwood - Sirens

TRACKLISTING: (1) SIRENS (2) NEGOTIATIONS AND LAST WORDS (3) I USED TO BE IN A BAND (4) AY GIVEN DAY (5) WINE AND RYE (6) A (7) B (8) BATS OVER BARSTOW (9) HEAVY ERA (10) THE BITTER END (11) FOR A GIRL LIKE MINE (12) PENNY DREADFUL

OVERVIEW: There are many extraordinary things about Pete Greenwood's debut record — the imagery that casts between "the canyon's twisty trees" and "cash on the bedside to pay the funeral bills", the guitar-playing that is fine and translucent and new-stemmed, but perhaps the most remarkable thing of all on an album of such rich, ripened subtlety is the fact that Greenwood has only been writing songs for less than two years.
 Raised in Leeds, Greenwood, 27, had relocated to London in 2002 with his then-band. When the band floundered, he enrolled upon a music degree at Goldsmith's, where he signed up for a songwriting class taught by Pete Astor of Hefner. Greenwood sat at home with a pad of paper and a guitar and worried. He listened to Blood on the Tracks "a few hundred times" and he worried some more. And then he set to writing. The result was Any Given Day, one of Sirens' most intoxicating tracks, a tale of a poor boy and a stranger and a crush.
 In truth Greenwood's musical education began long before university. As a child he would sit at his father's feet and watch him detune his guitar, he learned piano, and grew up steeped in folk music.
 
 There have been other inspirations since then — a brief jazznut period in 2002, for example, when he was supposed to be playing in "an angular punk pop band" but instead bought a double bass, started using licorice rolling papers and professed a desire to play like Charlie Mingus.
 Although he also plays with The Loose Salute and The See See, Greenwood's heart lies in writing his own material, and for the past two years he has been enjoying exploring the strange new world of songwriting.  The result is less of an album and more of a sort of musical trellis; twelve songs of structure and rigidity and lush lyrical sprawl, including Greenwood's attempts at writing "a really really crappy ITV drama", tales about taxi drivers on the Westway, Victorian gin, Charles Manson and the search for a pair of decent shoes, all told in his soft, earthy tones. It is a collection of songs that he hopes tethers him to a narrative songwriting tradition.

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