One Day At A Time
25 September 2008 
As a preview to my new Rocking Horse album, we will be releasing a double A side single on November 10th 2008.
The songs ‘What To Do’ and ‘One Day at a Time’ feature on the single which will be available via download on the One Little Indian store and from all major download sites.
I am so happy to be able to share this new music with you. It is a completely new direction for me and I am really curious and eager to hear what you all think!
(photo by Lara Jade)
I will soon be publishing a journal on this site which I kept whilst making the Rocking Horse album with Max Richter in Edinburgh and Glasgow, earlier this year, for now, here’s an excerpt from the journal about writing the song ‘One Day at a Time’.....
Of my own songs, One Day at a Time is one of my most favorite and I really go to another place when I sing it. I wrote this song about facing challenges and growing with someone through life.I wanted to try and capture an essence of the beauty of loving another person and how it feels very natural to learn and grow together. The many lessons and struggles we face as human beings passing through this very transient, mysterious space and time are constantly teaching us how to develop and become stronger, hopefully wiser.
I share this journey day by day, through life’s many challenges and experiences, and through caring for deeply for someone, we can learn more about the world and each other.
I hadn’t before been able to capture my deep feelings of gratitude and profound appreciation for being able to share this incredible journey with my companion. For some reason, this is one of the hardest things to write about. It is, I suppose a great challenge to write about love in a way which is fresh and without sounding trite.
I wondered when I was writing One Day at a Time, if I should try and develop the chord structure to move somewhere else and if I should make this song go to different places melodically. However, much the same as life and our journey together, One Day at a Time remained dreamlike and hypnotizing and its beauty seemed in the way it simply started as a statement or testimony of love and deepened in its visual elements of nature, such as the eagle and the the trees we have often admired on our journeys and the walks we have taken throughout our time together.
Many of my songs are based around hypnotic and repetitive chant like patterns. There is something very attractive and mesmerizing to me about the cyclic nature of music and I am often experimenting with ways of expanding an idea that doesn’t necessarily rest on chord changes. If a song can remain on the same chord pattern for its entirety, it must be a very strong chord sequence.
I didn’t really know what the chords were that I wrote for the music, they came from just playing around and exploring different shapes on the guitar but people seem to find them a strange combination when they hear them. I suppose that is one of the nice things about not knowing music in the formal sense, you are more likely to experiment and put things together which don’t necessarily work on paper. I love that and have to remind myself when I get frustrated about not being able to read music or play the guitar well, that this is probably what makes me explore unpredictable musical places and therefore, results in more natural and obscure melody.
The vocals to this song are fragile and almost hymnal and quite challenging so I was relieved when we completed recording them. It’s important to totally lose oneself in the song but also to retain a control of breath , so that tuning is not lost, if you get too excited or emotional, this can sometimes make it hard to focus and deliver a decent performance. After years of singing, I realize that this is one of the most important elements of performance. I am still not the best at staying in tune and would rather give myself and the song over to feeling the song and vocals with my heart but luckily, I managed to sing the vocals fine and am very in love with the way this song has turned out.
One Day at a Time has captured, for me, the ethereal nature of our journeys around the beautiful woods of California, seeing Eagles and wonderful mountains and all the learning that comes from traveling together. Sleeping under the stars, not knowing what will happen next but feeling safe in the arms of the earth and the wonderful adventure of a free and spirited life. This song is my prayer and testament to the beauty of nature.
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On 26 August 2008 Brodie-Ann said:
I can’t wait to hear this song and the single!
I will definatley be buying one. Thank you for sharing your personal insights into the song also- it rare for an artist to be so open about both their inspirations for a song and it’s also its physical development and songwriting approach.
X
Brodie-Ann