The Regional Variations - advance copies
. Swimmer One’s debut album, The Regional Variations, is officially released at the end of September, but is available to buy from various places now - you can order it online via the shop page on this website. If you want to try before you buy, you can listen to extracts from four songs for free at this website’s music page.
If you prefer to download the album track by track, be our guest. Order it on CD, though, and you get your own copy of the beautiful artwork designed by our long-time collaborator, Daniel Warren.
The artwork, like this website, features images from the Dapuri Drawings, painted by an unknown Portugese-Indian artist for the Bombay Botanic Gardens, between 1847 & 1850. The images now live at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, a fact which we thought provided a nice metaphor. The flowers could be people, travelling vast distances across the world and finding a new home in a very different kind of climate (as so many people now do). Or they could be songs, which also find unexpected new homes in corners of the world far from where they started their journey (Swimmer One songs, for example, which have found listeners as far afield as Japan, Australia and Mexico). Most simply, they could also be me and Hamish - it’s no accident that there are two flowers in each image, separate but connected. Not that either of us think we look like exotic flowers, but we do try to create beautiful things together.
Anyway, it seemed like a good image to illustrate The Regional Variations. One of the album’s main themes is the way that the littlest differences between people can affect they way they behave towards each other, and the way that it’s often the smallest, most mundane gestures of goodwill that bring people together. It’s regional variations more than national variations that define people, I’ve always thought - people are too complicated to be reduced to national stereotypes. But we should also treasure those differences rather than try and overcome them. It always slightly annoys me that so many pop songs bang on about how people are ‘all the same’ - Ugly by the Sugababes is the first that springs to mind, or Ebony and Ivory, or countless others. People are not all the same; life would be horribly bland and boring if they were. Hence the line in Regional, one of the songs on the album: ‘They told you lies when they told you everyone is just the same, or why would I love you at all?’
Anyway, the title relates to each song on the album in a slightly different way - something I’ve been blogging about on this site, and will continue to do. (And this is starting to read far more like a blog than a news story, so I’ll stop now. Hope you enjoy the album, and do leave some comments on the site to let us know what you think.)
Andrew
