Heystephen.com - Stephen Hay music and more

This is it. I’ve paid my registration for the BMUS  music degree, there’s no turning back. I think I’m the kind of guy that prefers to commit to something before knowing completely if it will work, rather than wait for a safe, guaranteed outcome. Risk-taker? A “calculated-risk” taker maybe. All I know is that I freaking love London, and I freaking love music: playing, studying, teaching, writing… This is my life at the moment and I’ll try to keep it that way as long as I can. And now I have a pretty good motivation to raise the necessary funds to get into 2nd year. It has to happen, there is no alternative.

The first gig I ran was a huge success - we jam-packed the little upstairs music venue, all the musicians were amazing and everyone seemed to really enjoy it. After costs we raised about £500 towards my uni fees which is amazing! I’m totally humbled by people’s generous donations - thanks! So now I have about £3500 to raise to pay for my 2nd year uni fees. That’s not a small figure, but hopefully with a bunch more events I’ll scrape through by the seat of my pants (sorry, trousers) and start 2nd year debt-free. Speaking of which…

My next gig is coming up soon and I’d love if you could make it. I’m calling it “Kind of a big deal” cause it kinda is - it’s a great venue, a BIG venue for me (150 capacity) and this time I’ve booked bands, or solo artists with bands, as opposed to acoustic-only artists. I want to push my music more in that way - aiming for a fuller, produced and professional sound. I’ve enlisted some incredible and generous musicians to play for me, and also to feature on the night. It’s also my uni band “Sharp Eleven”s first gig outside of uni, which we are all pretty excited about. Here’s the important stuff:

Friday the 27th of May, 7:30pm - 12:00am.

Venue: The Fiddlers Elbow, 1 Malden Road, Kentish town, London NW5 3HS.

Entrance is by donation as usual - I’m suggesting £5 or £10 which I reckon is cheap for a quality music night like this, but I would say that! All proceeds go towards my uni fees, please donate generously, but of course if you can’t afford much don’t feel pressured, I just want to see all your lovely faces there.

The lineup, in no particular order:

• Stephen Hay (that’s me) - listen at www.heystephen.com/music
• Daniela Hogger - www.myspace.com/danielahogger
• Ben Southam - www.bensoutham.com
• AnnaJo - www.annajo.co.uk
• Sharp Eleven - Find us on Facebook

I’m also in the middle of writing a new song about being caught up in the sights and sounds of this city - you know I’m a big fan of London, I’m not gonna lie to ya. Another first for me - I’m getting the amazing Aimée Mutambo to sing feature vocals for it, super excited! If you’ve heard her sing you’ll understand why. It’s a bit jazzy, I like it anyway - here’s a little sample.

Enough about me, how are you?

I’m a pretty determined young chap. I’ll have you know I fixed our shower curtain AND loft door recently. This, however, is pretty ambitious, even by my standards. I’m planning on continuing my music studies here in London. No, I AM continuing my music studies here in London. There, I said it. I’m going for the full three year BMUS music degree; the course I’m doing now is a one-year HNC certificate course. This means a few things: I need to really nail this years course, as well as do a conversion course which allows me to jump straight into the second year of the BMUS course. So I’m gonna be busy.

It also means I need to raise a heck of a lot of money. £7500, or thereabouts. How much?!? Who has that kind of money? And can we please be friends? I have some money in New Zealand from some work I did there, and from selling my drum kit, but nothing like this. As it is I’m barely covering my rent, let alone saving for school fees - so in comes the master plan. Instead of playing any old gigs, I’m going to start running my own. I find a venue, I book some willing (and generous) artists, and put it all together. I did something similar in my hometown last year, but this will be a first for me in London - I’m pretty excited.

Doing the rounds in the unsigned music scene in London can become a bit of a drag, playing the same venues and trying to impress promoters etc, all for a pretty small profit. At least this way, I figure I can have a decent go at raising enough money to put myself through uni. I guess in a way it also means I’m my own boss - I play where I want to play, and for as long as I want (both within reason), but of course I have all the risk of a promoter. Control freak? Yeah…

I’ve set up a Facebook page if you want to join up right here, and if you’re in London, I’d love you to come to one of my events, the first one coming up soon in March. Watch this space…

Hello, yes it’s me again. It’s been a while so I thought I’d update you all on musical things. My plan is to write a super-short update and give you some music to keep you happy until next time, but somehow I doubt I can keep this short… Here we go anyway:

Since last post I’ve been busy. I played a concert in my tiny hometown of Kerikeri, NZ (love you!); the night was nothing short of a success, with tickets selling out the day before, my fellow musicians and I making relatively few mistakes, and I think I can say people seemed to really enjoy it! Thanks again everyone who came, we had an amazing time. Here’s a short highlights reel if you couldn’t make it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2i-h0gvC5T8

Shortly after the gig I flew to Japan for a holiday and to catch up with some friends. There’s some photos on facebook if you want to see what I got up to, but perhaps something more interesting  would be my foray into famous landmark performances. I played my song “Awkward” whilst crossing the Shibuya pedestrian crossing in central Tokyo, check out the footage below or here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_oTZghu2QE

Aaaand now I’m (back) in London, studying music performance on guitar at LCCM, being really challenged and learning from some amazing tutors (and students!). I’ve played one gig so far, for a friend of mine who runs the music website and live music night Cherry Ekko. They actually recorded it too so please if you have time, go to http://www.cherryecho.com/downloads.asp to download my four-song live EP. So many links, gosh I’m really sorry.

I’m not that sorry.

So now I’m thinking ahead. I’m going to try and focus more on the band-sound more and more, I feel like I can really get my soul/funk/jazz style across a whole lot better that way. So now I need to find band-members, which is what I’m working on in the background.

(Almost) enough from me, I’ll leave you with this: http://bit.ly/aC63at. Yup, another link. This is a song I wrote for my friend’s birthday. If you don’t know her already, perhaps you’ll feel like you know her after hearing it.

Enjoy!

It’s been a little while, but I’ve finally finished the next addition to my free acoustic album. It’s called “Awkward” and it’s pretty self explanatory. I played the old version of it at the Proud Galleries in Camden, but have since tidied up the verses to make them fit the vibe of the song better. I’ve been wanting to write about the subject for quite a while - it’s just so universal! Everyone is stuck in those painful situations from time to time - maybe someone unintentionally insults someone else present in a small group setting, or perhaps everyone is made uncomfortable by one person who goes a bit far with some off-coloured joke… you know what I mean. So hopefully this song captures that feeling anyway.

The mp3 is (of course) free for download, just right-click this link and save the file to your music folder: http://www.heystephen.com/music/Awkward%20-%20acoustic.mp3. Alternatively, you might want to download the whole album, just go to www.heystephen.com/music and enter your email address - you’ll get an email with a confirmation link to download it. Oh yeah, lyrics are here: http://www.heystephen.com/music/awkward/

Hope you enjoy it - let me know what you think!

Until next time

Stephen

Hi all - just a quick vlog with a groove I came up with last week - if you can’t see it above just go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DwU5TBAIyw

I’m in the process of deciding on which lyrical themes and musical ideas to use for my next song. In the meantime I’ll record an acoustic version of my latest song “Awkward” and add it to my free album for you to download - you should see that by the end of next week.

Cheers

S

PS For fellow music geeks, it’s an A minor 7 +11 +♮13 , played with capo 2 and  like this: 5×5530. Although you probably worked that out already.

Just a quick one, I posted another video blog explaining some music developments and playing “You Got Me” - if you can’t see it above you can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoXZh-OqJy8

Take care everyone, and have a super-blessed Easter break  :-)

Stephen

Pretty positive title huh? I hate thinking of titles but this one seems to do the trick.

A couple of developments:

I’ve recorded a couple more tracks for Future Reflections: ”You Got Me” which I finished a few weeks ago, and also “Future Wife” which I just recorded today. You can preview the individual tracks or download the whole album from my music page. Yes it’s free, share it around if you like it! If you’d like to be involved as I continue to add to the album, just follow me on Twitter or Facebook and continue the conversation. I’ll be using these sites to get valuable feedback and input towards finishing the album.

In other news, I’ve met some people recently who are helping me move things forward with my music. I met Tobi, who is kind-of managing me now, at a friends  place about a month ago. Him, Josh and my friend Nat (who’s a producer) were practising for a gig, and since I had my guitar I couldn’t help but jam along. I had no idea who they were - after showing them some of my stuff I discovered that Josh is a professional live and session drummer, and Tobi is in artist management and has loads of industry contacts. They are super-excited about my music and making it huge, so suddenly everything has been in fast-forward - recording new demos, more writing, meeting marketing people; it’s been a great incentive to get things moving.

An interesting exercise was putting together a “mood board” - basically a collection of images which represent me and an art style which suits. Above is a tag cloud generated from some descriptive keywords we came up with - is that about right? I can’t wait to get some art concepts together.

Gig-wise it’s been pretty quiet except for the occasional acoustic charity gig - I’m planning something big in May but I’ll let you know once that’s all confirmed. As I’ve probably mentioned, I’ll be playing with a live band more and more now, which is awesome as that’s how I’ve always imagined it.

S

So… I set myself a target to record my song “Busy Life”  by the end of this week. I started and finished it on Monday. Great! But just before I uploaded it, I thought: “I should make these into an album”.

It’s funny, just by calling it an “album”, it instantly increases the official-ness and coolness factor. It’s no longer: “Oh, yeah I’ve got some tracks online”; it’s: “I’m recording a free acoustic album from home, it’s not finished yet but you can download what I’ve got so far”. Told you it sounds cooler. And it has a name too, Future Reflections. I quite like the idea - I write a song, play it live, then record it and start a new one - people can watch the process unfold over the months and really be a part of it. I can even sell half-finished albums (at cost) at any gigs I play… kinda quirky. You can download the part-album for yourself from my music page.  I’ve remixed the older tracks at a higher bitrate too, so they sound a little nicer if you’re using headphones.

So speaking of writing an album, I’ve foolishly decided to write a brand new song before my next gig at Proud (which, I might add, will be amazing). So far I have one chord, a likely tempo, and some ideas but that’s about it. Still haven’t committed to a lyrical theme yet, I’m tossing up between “I’m pretty big in Japan”, “Those awkward moments that make us cringe but are actually enjoyed by some weird people like myself”, and “No-one understands me when I speak”. All working titles, of course. I better get writing - I love setting myself deadlines like this, it really works!

So hopefully see you at Proud Galleries in Camden on the 17th of February, and don’t forget to download my “album”!

Peace

Stephen

Good afternoon people, enjoying the beautiful weather? (The sarcasm will probably be lost to my southern-hemisphere subscribers). It’s snowing outside, and it makes me smile every time I notice.

I just posted another video blog, you can watch it by clicking that link or directly in this post if you’re reading this on my site:

I’m working on my new song called “Future wife”, it’s what I’m calling a “hypothetical love-song”. I’ve played part of it for you on that video, check it out if you haven’t already. Disclaimer: the audio sync is all messed up, and I can’t be bothered spending any more time on it. I have to find a better way to do these, I think it’s the built-in webcam on my laptop, it’s just not that flash…

Anyway I hope you like the song, make sure you come down to the Troubadour next Tuesday to hear it in full. Details here, here and here. £6 on the door, 8pm start, closest tube Earls Court.

In other news, I’m thinking of writing an awkward song, you know, about all those painful social situations. Like when you take a joke or something a little too far, and then it’s awkward. I do this quite a bit. Hmm. Think of some examples and reply to this by email or on facebook with some ideas - I’ll probably end up including some in the final version. 100 points for the best example, and 500 points if it’s something you’ve actually done yourself!

Take care everyone, and hopefully see you soon

S

Seasons greetings to you all!

It’s only one day to go, and I’m rather excited. I was really late thinking about Christmas cards this year, so I thought I’d write a Christmas song instead. It was refreshing to break out of the jazz/groove thing for a day and just write a normal guitar song. It was also cool to think I could write a song for a purpose like this, record it and post it online in time for Christmas. Technology these days.

Speaking of which, I’ve started a youtube video blog, where I can post my song ideas, talk about random music stuff and basically mumble too much, along with a healthy amount of new music. If you’re interested, you’ll find it here: www.youtube.com/stephenhaymusic.

And here is my first video blog post, with My Christmas Song:

Sorry if you received this via email, it probably won’t work… just go to my youtube channel to view it in your browser.

And so merry Christmas everyone, and wishing you all an amazing 2010. I’ve got some exciting gigs coming up next year so stay tuned - the best way to find out where and when is to follow me via email, facebook, myspace or last.fm, or just check the homepage of this site. I’m also recording at the moment, I’m excited to get some new and old stuff online so you don’t have to keep looping the same three tracks! (You know who you are)

Take care everyone

Stephen