Off The Grid

Time In The Trees was the result of me spending a year back in the old woods where I grew up in West Sussex. I wanted to see how being there every day affected my song writing and the sounds we used. Some songs are about trees directly, some are just ideas I had in the woods. This one was the latter.

I started to write Off The Grid the day after I’d had a chat with a friend working in the security services, who was explaining why they’d never go on Facebook. They were concerned both about the unhealthy behaviour of those people who they monitor and being monitored themselves.

I started digging more into this topic, reading the excellent “Coders” by Clive Thompson of Wired magazine, “Outnumbered, the algorithms that control our lives” by David Sumpter, and the less readable “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Shosanna Zuboff.

I realised just how much our behaviour is driven by algorithms giving us little hits of dopamine as Likes, and how this is an integral part of capitalism. I doubt this will be my last song on this topic.

As an aside, I’m unreasonably proud of the defining sound in this song: the harmonium and the cello together in the choruses. It shouldn’t work as both instruments are in a similar register, but… it does.