Category Archives: glass cage

Can we ever say more than we did our best?

Delta Ladies, Diana Stones Songs, glass cage, music, Musings, whatever

Can we ever say more than we did our best?  I am not sure we can really. I am mired in gloom today and not really sure why. The sun was out on a crisp winters day.  I took a brief trip to the shop to collect from the amazon locker.  Came home and tried to work on some project stuff but I couldn’t get motivated at all, though I did start a lyric and a couple of ideas for a tune or possibly two.  Its the first week of my extended exercise routine and I think its helpful.  I need to keep fairly mobile now if I can. Otherwise if I ever play a gig again I will  keel over from exhaustion before I even get started. Its a very clear, very cold night heer in Bedfordshire and you can recognise a couple of the major constellations.  the universe continues perfectly well without my interference of course 🙂  Everything feels so strange as we come close to the first anniversary of   restrictions brought in for Covid-19 in the UK where at the time of writing we are on our third lockdown which will be in place until at least spring judging by the way things are currently going.  Some days go well enough but today  has been hard for me. I would like to talk to one or two absent friend but they have passed beyond the orbit of this world now. Its hard going.  I dreamt I was playing a gig with the full line-up of the Delta Ladies with Vicky martin at the helm  in some big edwardian pub or other. Its seems like another world now to be honest. So on waking ity was disappointing to know that that’s pretty much all gone now.  Vicky was a pretty much irreplaceable force of nature and whilst I did attempt to carry on it  we could not quite make escape velocity in the end.  Plus lockdown finished everything  pretty much in March of  2020.   2021 has started and I feel exhausted mentally and  I feel I am beyond the point  where I can try and pick up the pieces again to be honest.  I do not expect there to be anyone riding out of the shadows to pick up the baton now. I am not even sure if I can actually cut it live now frankly.  It’s now nearly one year since the last Delta Ladies gig in a small pub in reading called “The Retreat”. Remaining members of the band have also had fairly serious ill health  to contend with too.  Its possible there may be a grand finale at some point. But there needs to be a  new road or else there is no road to travel now.

It’s  a pretty low ebb for me now. I really need be mixing with people but the current situation makes it impossible of course.  My fairly paranoid internal dialogue is increasingly difficult to block as well.  I am creating music and trying to keep going.  One day at a time is as good as it gets though.  From here onward is obscured to me assuming there is a going forward from this point as nothing is guaranteed in this life.

I send out my musical messages in a bottle  into the either and wonder…

So can we ever say more than we did our best?

 

Diana Stones Glass Cage Press kit link and info

Diana Stones Songs, glass cage, music, Musings

http://www.reverbnation.com/rpk/dianastone

About Diana Stone

Diana is a performing composer and musician playing Piano Violin & Guitar, synths and other stuff. She was a founder member of Rock/Roots band Elephant Shelf and also the Delta Ladies. She composes in a variety of styles from pop to rock to Jazz and and classical music .Diana is also expert in multi-media recording and music production.

Glass Cage is the name that Diana’s solo projects use.

have been playing various instruments since I was about 15. I started on Harmonica, because it looked easy and it was cheap. I didn’t get on that well with it though. I had always enjoyed the Piano but where I was living it was not possible for the familly to have one frustratingly. We tried to get my Grandmas old piano, but sadly we lived in an upstairs flat and could not get it in. I made do with something called a reed organ, which was a bit like a harmonium with an electric blower. I did learn some basic things on it though. I also had a guitar which I made serious efforts with too. One instrument I had always really liked was the Violin and I started playing that too. It was very difficult to start with and I gave up for a year or so, but for some reason I thought I would have another go at it and started again.

Fast forward a few years and I had been messing about with second hand tape machines and making recordings by bouncing sound from one tape recorder to another. I had a fairly stable job and at that point the Mk1 Teac Portastudio first appeared. Well I had to have one. By this time I had started to build up an interesting collection of Instruments keyboards guitars and so forth. I had rarely played live though. I was a bit of a techie and when I discovered you could create something called an mp3 file and put it on your website, there was no holding me back. I have a lot of music on the web. Everything from completed tracks to demos. The material spans roughly from about 1995 till the present.It covers a lot of musical genres as I have always been diverse in my musical tastes. I am still exploring musically and trying to learn something new along the way. Time passed and having assumed that I would not be doing anything much live ever, in 2004 I was invited to join a band. I have carried on with my personal musical out pourings till now, but have also played around 2200 odd gigs as well. That’s something I never thought would happen. Its funny how life takes you in different directions than you expect.

https://soundcloud.com/dianastone

 

 

The nights are drawing in again

Diana Stones Songs, glass cage, Musings

 

Sad songs from me at the moment. 

It’s dark as I write this now.  The world is quiet still yet, cars going by but the building sites stopped now.  The work is nearly finished now apart from 2 houses that still need a roof on and some landscaping to be finished but it could well be done by Christmas or not long afterwards at the at rate its currently be done.

The builders have provided a lot of entertainment and education  during the time they have been here,so I now know a lot more about how houses are built from the ground up. I will miss the show when its gone.  I will though have a little park that I can sit in and day dream if I whish when its finished if I am lucky. It should be OK as long as they dont think I am a vagrant and try to move me on.    

I have had a lot of time to think. But we are of course still in Covid-19 limbo and will be for quite  a while.  At best till the spring, but maybe a lot longer.  In the mornings here there is a mist that rolls along the water meadows at this time of year that looks quite magical.  I have never had the presence of mind to get a decent photo of it yet though. Mostly in the mornings it takes me about an hour to get the aching bones moving.  That can be hard work at times,  particularly as things are now.   I have a back brace that I wear part of the time that helps but not always. Mostly its useful to stop me slumping as I type which makes a big difference.  Maybe if I can get match fit I  will be able to get back to some of the things I used to do previously as a web developer.  That’s not the most important thing by any means though but then what is?