Craig Explains The Whole Deal on Latest Album
The reason I called my album ‘As If To Nothing’ is to do with the fact that working a lot with music over the years and becoming aware of the sort of intangible quality of music. And the fact that in many ways unlike a painting or a novel it actually doesn’t exist in a material sense, it actually exists just in terms of sound waves. I felt the title ‘As If To Nothing’ would be a good way to define and describe this feeling of etherealness in music.
For this album I decided that although there was a lot of instrumental music, quite a lot of the record would contain songs and obviously for these songs I needed to find singers and collaborators.
One of the first artists that I decided to work with was David McAlmont, who did the track ‘Snow’. We actually wrote the lyrics together for it and we recorded it in Glasgow.
Bono, is someone who I have done a lot of work for over the years in terms of string arrangements for U2. I said to Bono I would pick my favourite track which was ‘Faraway so Close’ and we would work on that and see where that would get to.
Mogwai, another artists I collaborated with, are actually a Glasgow band. It turned out to be the most fascinating project. I love the way their music is so filmic and so fascinating. I felt in many ways their sense of space; their sense of dimension and landscape is quite similar to mine.
In a sense I have been working on this new album from the period where I finished with my first album. Even when I was in Australia working on Moulin Rouge, I was still writing some work for my solo record. In all, maybe a couple of years.
The song that I composed first was ‘Ruthless Gravity’. It was a song which in many ways defined the whole record. It was a song that was very complete and I decided that I would take fragments from that song and it would be interpreted through the album, little fragments of the melody would appear through the album. So in many ways it being the first track was quite lucky because it was almost the theme that the whole album was created from.
The last track was ‘Let it Be Love’, and this is a track that like ‘The Space Between Us’ I wanted a feeling that the album was resolving that it was coming to a positive end, something that was uplifting.
Between ‘The Space Between Us’ and ‘As if to Nothing’ in terms of the creative process there isn’t a lot that’s changed. I approach both albums with the same sort of intensity. The only difference is the fact that in ‘As if to Nothing’ there is this idea of musical development where one track can filter down through the album bit by bit but other than that there’s not a lot.
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Armstrong Returns with 'As If To ...
