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me. You can cut out the middle man and just go onto The Stroke Association website,
which I believe is stroke.org.uk and make a donation in my dad's memory.
BiTS: Tell me something else, which is what is your ambition for the long term?
What do you want to be doing, shall we say, in five years’ time?
LW: Yeah, good question. I mean, the thing I'm really excited about at the moment
is songwriting. In addition to the album that's just out, I've got loads of songs that
I've started putting into my live set. I'm always ahead of the curve with the live set,
or you might see it as behind the curve with the albums because I'm always getting
new ideas. I kind of wake up in the night and have lyrics or a riff that I have to go
and record on my phone or write down, otherwise it keeps me up all night as I’d
worry about losing it. So I would like to keep developing as a songwriter and it's an
interesting challenge blues songwriting as well, because you want to respect the
tradition and keep within that tradition. And I love, you know, the 12-bar blues form,
which is a simple and standard form. But you also want to inject your own
personality into it, and I think that's a constant balance and a constant challenge.
And I mean that in a good way. You know I love that challenge and I want to keep on
trying to come up with new ways of doing that and new approaches to doing that.
I also want to keep improving as a performer
and a harmonica player, but I think my ambition
to being the best harmonica player on Earth
faded quite a while ago. [Chuckling] So, I think
I’d settled for being a good performer and a
decent player [laughing].
BiTS: Just tell me one more thing. With regard
to the album “Shine”, what was the motivation
in actually producing the album? Was it just
simply that you wanted to do some charity
work, or what?
LW: I mean, I've always, for many years, wanted
to do something for The Stroke Association. I've
thought about various different things – not all
musically related. Not long after my dad died, I used to do long-distance running
and I was training for a marathon, and I got an injury, and I did my knee in and
basically it stopped me running. Full stop. But I had been intending to run for The
Stroke Association, and I never got to do that, so there was always this sort of desire
to do something. I ummed and ahhed over different things and then it kind of
dawned on me because I had this song, ‘Shine’, that I had developed and ended up
finishing, and I had other songs that were kind of steeped in other aspects of my
dad's life and my dad's opinions and all of that. It dawned on me that, well, you know,
I'm a musician. Why can't the next album be a charity album? So there was always
going to be an album, but the way that it's formed as it has, has been a natural desire
to do something for The Stroke Association.