Dear all, time flies and everybody’s moving except myself. I’m sitting here with an injured foot and am hardly able to walk inside the house. This is the fourth or fifth health incident I am suffering of in just a few months’ time. Needless to say that this is frightening me a bit, and I am still trying to figure out whether it’s just a matter of age or whether I am just constantly overloading myself, and now I have to pay the bill for doing so. I just don’t know. But it’s getting better from day to day again, and I am a fighter in this sense. I will come back for sure. Nevertheless the next gigs are coming up. Platform No 6 will play here in Schweinfurt at the Museum at a celebration of female unionists for the world womens’ day. That’ll take place on the 7th of March. Then there’ll be a show in Bamberg at an after work party end of April, and in May we’ll be playing a farewell gig for our bassman Juergen Bruhn who is retiring from work then. We have two more inquiries, one for May and one for July. For some of us this is already enough for a year, and I tend to feel the same. With the Erratics, I’ll be playing a show on the 10th of March at a birthday party in Schwebheim in the old “Schmiede”, a fantastic location for small club concerts with 100 to 120 people. And I bet it’ll be fully crowded again. Then there’s another gig which I forgot to note down (I’ll let you know next time), and one more in July. Some more inquiries are still running. PAM will meet for another weekend workshop mid of April, and with the Platformers there’ll be a workshop as well in the beginning of May. Lots of dates, lots of busy weekends, and I have to see to get into a better shape again quite soon, otherwise I will fail to keep the pace sooner or later. Probably sooner. Anyway, Chris D and myself have started to work on the second album of the High Field Band. We recorded the basic tracks of 11 songs, just a drum machine and myself singing and playing guitar. Based on these we will add one track after the other in the coming weeks and months, starting with vocals and guitars, then drums and bass, and then keyboards, horns and special guests. Looking at the agenda as mentioned above, and looking at myself in my current shape I would estimate that we won’t be ready with recording before at least end of April, maybe even later. But I’m sure it will be worth waiting for. I am particularly looking forward to the new songs I wrote and/or finished some 6 weeks ago. I have issued sketches here on N1M which I recorded on my own, but besides the fact that I still like to listen to ‘em I feel that we could do much better as a band, and that the songs will gain quality and atmosphere which I am eager to see and hear. Last time I promised to elaborate a bit more on the content of the new ones. Well, let’s start with “Ocean of dreams”. It starts with a two-guitar-hookline which of course is written for horns and not for guitars, but I can’t play any brass instrument, so I have to replace everything with guitars. On the album it’ll be different then. The origin of this hookline goes back to the early 90s. Chris F, singer of PAM, used to listen to a funk band called The Pasadenas at that time, and I remember a song called “Ridin’ on a train” to which we listened in his flat one day. I didn’t really buy into their music at that time, but this song remained somewhere in the back of my head. Trying to write songs for PAM and Broken Toy in the mid 90s, I intended to write songs in this funky style as well but failed. The only thing that came into my mind was this hookline, and I noted it down somewhere and now, more than 20 years later, used it to open up “Ocean of dreams”. The rest of the song is rather reggae or even ska style, at least off-beat, and I am still reasoning how much of this character we’ll keep for the album version. Let’s see what happens in Chris D’s studio once we start recording this one. The lyrics are about the paradoxon of being a dreamer and a pragmatic at the same time. I strongly believe that you need to set high goals for yourself in order to reach the possible result. But you also need to realize that not everything is possible or even senseful. Reach out for what you’re dreaming of, but be happy with what you achieve, even if it’s not completely in line with your dreams. If all your dreams came true, what would you dream of then? And it’s all right… I’ll leave you with this now, and promise to keep you posted, as always. Keep on rockin’! Yours schnoed