Richard Laurence from Gifts from Crows talks about the inspiration for his new album 'Holding a Thought Forever'

Gifts from Crows new release 'Holding a Thought Forever' was inspired by the early days of the first UK-wide lockdown in March 2020. Scala Radio is playing one track - 'As Nature Returns' - as part of New Release Friday on Friday 19 February.

We spoke to composer Richard Laurence who wrote the track about the inspiration for his first album.

You wrote this album during lockdown, didn't you?

I've used it as a way of keeping sane. I don't know what I would have done without having having music to focus on. I had these some of these ideas are sort of floating around before the first lockdown. It all came together really after March 2020. I suppose I had the time to actually sit down and do it and expose the you know, all the excuses of why you couldn't sit down and do the recording. All those things were gone. You're just left with the piano getting on with it, really.

So it helped with procrastination?

Yes. I love the writing process. And more often than not when I sit down at the piano I start writing something. But, it's the gap between writing and committing it to a recording - that's the bit when I procrastinate. I suppose that's the bit where it's either going to achieve its potential or not. There's just this really big concern that you won't be able to get a version of it down that's as good as the version in your head.

What is the recording process like for you?

You're either capturing a magical moment or you're not. It can fall down at any stage. It can fall down if it's not actually as good a piece of music as you thought. That's the magic of music when you listen to recordings, say like great jazz recordings from the 1940s or whatever.Like the Blue Note recordings. There was no mixing or editing it was simply going straight to the vinyl. And there is a magic to those recordings. If you listen back now you know that the musicians are in the room with you. It just sounds so live. That's where you realise what the magic of music is: capturing one of those performances. And even though we've got all these digital tools now, we should still try to capture a moment of some story. Otherwise, it's not worth anything.

Does that indicate how you like to work as a musician?

In the past, I've always worked with other musicians. So it isn't normal for me to be doing things on my own. But lockdown has sort of precipitated a way of working, especially with all these fantastic tools we have at our disposal. I tend not to play separate tracks to a tempo, click track or anything. I just play and try and get the right feeling. I just like to make things very difficult for myself. The end result is you've got a piece of music that feels organic, when you listen back to it, and it doesn't feel as if it's been corrected. That's what I mean about trying to capture a moment. It's the sort of thing that if it was working with anyone else, it would drive them mad.

Tell us about the album - how did you come to write it?

A number of things led to me creating the album. We have an old piano in our family. It's about 140 years old. Really beautiful. Walnut inlay and a brass frame candelabra. It's a postcard sort of piano that cannot be tuned to concert pitch - it refuses to. It owns its own tuning. But it has this absolutely beautiful resonance that I've never heard on another piano. It's a weird combination of the materials it's made of - nothing like a modern piano. I remember it from childhood. The piano came back to me a number of years ago after being in my mom's house. I started playing it again. That was the first step I suppose towards this album. I noticed that playing it was just muscle memory.

The second factor was my brother passing away. That had a huge impact on me. I suppose one of the ways I dealt with that was that I started writing music again. I hadn't written quite a few years, for one reason or another. I'd just been playing along. The piano, my brother's passing and the lockdown just started a process. It wasn't planned. Suddenly I find myself at home with a lot more time on my hands and, and no excuse but to other than to start recording.

What are the themes behind the tracks?

The album is me returning to something that is very, very central to who I am and what I need to do. So, there's a track on the album called remembering who and what we are. That's a really important track to me.

There's another track called 'Something Thought Lost is Found'. That's very much about kind of my, my gratitude to having music and it just being something I'm able to turn to. I think the theme of bereavement is, obviously is a key one too.

Then the final one is really just the ongoing anguish we all feel about the environment and climate change. There's a number of tracks that about my feelings about that. 'As Nature Returns' was a key piece of music that was written in the first month of lockdown.

Last spring I think we all noticed a lot more, didn't we? Suddenly everything stopped and we found ourselves noticing just how loud the birds were when we went out for a walk. That time made made me think about, you know, the arrogancethat we all worry about all the end of the world because of climate change. It's not really the end of the world: it will only be the end of us. Because nature comes back, doesn't it?

Listen to Gifts from Crows As Nature Returns on Simon Mayo's show on Scala Radio, from 10am on Friday 19 February.

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