Northumberland's Gareth Davies-Jones working on songs for live album

BRITISH folk roots singer/songwriter Gareth Davies-Jones is working on material for a new live recording project. The working title is 'The Valley'. Said Davies-Jones, "It's focused on sketching out what's known as a song cycle or "a series of interconnected works on a specific theme by the same composer" to give it a formal description. It's something I've wanted to try for a while, something that follows in the tradition of great classical composers as far back as Schubert and Schumann but practised right up to the modern era in popular music by bands like Pink Floyd and Arcade Fire. Partly inspired by Woody Guthrie's Columbia River song cycle I'll be looking to create songs around a series of everyday photographs, diary entries and observations gathered together on a journey from Keilder Water in the North Tyne down to our home near Wylam in the main Tyne Valley in Northumberland." The songsmith hopes to release the project via iTunes by the end of September.