NEW SINGLE – ENGLISH SUMMER
Welcome to my website! The latest news is I’ve got a new single coming out on August 29th, called ‘English Summer’, which is the first taste of my upcoming second solo album (which I hope to have finished by the end of 2025)…
it’s a song written from the perspective of someone planning to emigrate, and reflecting on the state of country they grew up in… It’s also a song about Mythical England… From ‘Good King Penda’ to Charles III, village greens & country gardens; with a cast of characters along the way including Ray Davies & Nick Drake, Queen Victoria & Edward Elgar, Johnny Rotten & Syd Barrett… England as it lives in the imagination, in music & fiction & poetry, and how that can intersect awkwardly with the ‘real world’…
It’s a little bit of a sonic departure from my debut album. More of a ‘band’ sound (although the band is still just myself & Maree Choie). I play piano on it, and drum kit; and it’s also my first experiment with playing my own string parts (bowing a Japanese taishogoto and a one-stringed Spanish guitar)…
English Summer on Bandcamp
English Summer on Spotify
English Summer on Apple Music
English Summer on YouTube
THE CHANGING OF THE SEASONS – VINYL LPs & CDs
Meanwhile, vinyl & CD copies of my debut album, The Changing Of The Seasons, are now available…
Both formats come with a 12 page lyric booklet, which adapts the artwork from all the single releases, with wonderful drawings by Maree Choie…
You can order them both here – https://elasticstage.com/raphael-mann/releases/the-changing-of-the-seasons-album (They’re manufactured to order, so they can take a few weeks to ship out, so please be patient!)
MY DEBUT SOLO ALBUM
My first album as a solo artist is out now. It’s called The Changing Of The Seasons, and it’s a concept album of sorts… This is me ‘going up the country’, getting myself ‘back to the garden’… Finding out, by circumstance more than by design what it’s like to live away from the big city, to tune in to natural rhythms and observe the world around me as it lives and grows…
It also comes out of me needing to heal myself after difficult times, and craving a certain sort of music that I couldn’t find enough of – gentle songs, softly sung by English-accented voices, finger-picked acoustic guitars & pretty orchestrations; evocative of the English countryside – ‘Just Another Diamond Day’ and ‘Five Leaves Left’ and ‘A Gift From A Flower To A Garden’ – and deciding to create some for myself, in my own way…
You can find it on Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, etc., and watch the full album video on YouTube…
Here’s a selection of some of the other music I’ve been involved with recently… Have a browse around the rest of the site to hear more…
The first single from my upcoming debut solo album.
More on my solo recordings here.
My take on Clive Langer & Elvis Costello’s ‘Shipbuilding’, originally recorded by Robert Wyatt in 1982; from my album collaboration with Marianne Dissard, ‘Souvenir Of England: music from the stage production‘.
The latest single from Baka, sending the Nick Drake classic into space…
More about Baka here.
The Silver Panda was a lockdown project that grew into a band, collaborating on ‘weird covers’ with Maree Choie on woodwinds & vocals, & my daughter Mika joining in wherever she could.
This is us turning a Dinosaur Jr. favourite on its head… More about The Silver Panda here.
I’ve known Sugarcane’s Robin French since I took over from him as bass player for Mr Hudson & The Library, and when he launched his new group in 2018 I took the opportunity to collaborate with him in a production role. This was the first single we released & still one of my Sugarcane favourites…
More on Sugarcane here.
During 2020 & ’21 I produced an album of covers with Marianne Dissard, & was coaxed into singing a duet with her on this beautiful song by Townes Van Zandt.
Art & I have been collaborating on music for a couple of decades now. Here’s a single we made in 2022, an uplifting slice of life during Covid lockdown from the master songwriter…
More about my work with Art Terry here.
Ever since she learned to make a sound that wasn’t a cry my daughter Mika has been a fountain of tunes & hums, & we’ve always loved to sit & come up with songs together… This one appeared when she was 5, & I thought it was too good to keep to ourselves, so we recorded it (when she’d just turned 6)…
More about Mika’s music here.
I was lucky enough to be in Auckland, NZ, when Tom Rodwell was recording the basic tracks for his first solo album proper, & he invited me to the studio to ensure that all the grit & grain of his live sound made it onto the tape.
Read more about the ‘Wood & Waste’ sessions here.
I met Clair & Carli from Lunatraktors when I lived in Ramsgate (on England’s Kent coast), & was entranced by their live performances. Their 2019 debut album, ‘This Is Broken Folk’, which I helped them to produce, is basically a capture of some of their live repertoire at the time, recorded live in the studio without any overdubs… ‘Turn Of The Plough’ is the sole original composition on what is otherwise a set of radical reworkings of traditional songs…
More on ‘This Is Broken Folk’ here.