Category Archives: music

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?

 

More January 2021 thoughts

Diana Stones Songs, music, Musings, piano works

So due to the various problems that I’m having with my back and joints I am now resorting to dictating more than typing and unfortunately there’s not much I can do about that

It’s been quite disturbing to see there is reports of the police behaving aggressively in relation to their perceived notions of breaches or lockdown especially as it is quite clear that mostly interventions have been wrong and overzealous.
The  notion that it’s unsafe for example to exercise your dogs in an area of open countryside where they may actually not be other people for as much as 300 m or more.We also have government ministers trying to defend the indefensible.

Mostly due to their own incompetence and lack of understanding of the fundamentals of the situation.

Here is a recent solo piano work, which is a jazz/classical crossover. its played on a Yamaha Piano, but just unfortunately not the one shown 🙂 its  a bit moody and maybe a little weird but hey its me so what do you expect. 

I am quite upset set at present and also so trying to avoid falling into a fairly major depressive relapse. The notion of no reasonable social contact for potentially another 9 to 10 months is really  hard to deal with.
Personally I do actually believe that unless it is the degree of reasonableness people will cease to comply with any restrictions. For people like myself the days pretty much merge together and I do try and use this time to do something productive as much as it is possible to do so. Other difficulties which occur are not merely due to isolation but for example in my particular circumstances the only person I see day to day is my partner and I’ve only had face-to-face contact with two or three other people in the course of nearly a year unless you include the occasional encounter with a shop assistant.
Looking at the number of deaths in the UK from covid-19 I can imagine a scenario where it does actually hit 200000 Mark it certainly I think going to be well in excess of 100000 even if there’s a miracle.
So it makes you wonder what’s next martial law perhaps it still won’t make any difference because the Gene is already out of the bottle. I’m not really too sure what what the future is likely to bring at all for me personally. 80s I’m going to have major problems with my mental health soon if I’m not careful as I’m getting near the limit of tolerance on many matters.
Jotting down my random thoughts in this fashion is is quite satisfying as I’m not taking as much as I would be if I was actually typing thank goodness. It has been a hard couple of years though and it really doesn’t look as if it’s going to get any easier.

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