Temple Bells

When I visited India in 1986 with my family, I took my guitar with me. I imagined that India would be fertile ground for writing more music.

But as I have written in my book Eagalic Music, I think my creative powers were temporarily blocked in India as I couldn't summon any music. In retrospect, I think all of my resources were used up simply taking in and trying to process the vastness/immensity that is India.

I did a lot of writing in India though, keeping daily journals of many of our experiences. At a bookseller's in Connaught Circle downtown Delhi I purchased 6 enormous hard cover journals, each one weighing a couple of pounds at least.

I filled these up in the next year or so and started the process while still in India. But when we arrived in Greece and set up house on the island of Symi in April 1986 on the return leg of our journey to the East, I began to compose songs again and wrote the lyrics in the first of these huge books.

I composed most of the songs on my album Alchemy in Symi but I didn't compose Temple Bells until we arrived back home and settled into our house on Dovedale Road in Shawnigan Lake.

There I set up a makeshift home studio using a 4 track recorder (a Tascam Porta One) and that is where I recorded Temple Bells.

A couple of months ago I uploaded the first of my unreleased songs The Crofton Mill in mp3 format to my website Eagalic Music and on November 25 I attempted to upload a second song, Temple Bells.

After setting up the post with the lyrics I discovered that the upload function was not working and I couldn't decipher why as an error bar appeared in place of the upload progress bar which covered a background error message with the word "dismiss".

I presented my difficulty to Danny my website designer and friend and on a computer at work, the error message was clear...the file was too big. Danny solved this by increasing the server file size upload limit and although it took him a few days to get to it, the file is now uploaded and if you are interested you can hear one of my songs definitely inspired by India.

Go to: http://www.eagalicmusic.com/ and check out the November 25th post where you will find the lyrics and an mp3 version of this song.