This Fall we hosted Composer, Bradley Thomas Turner, at Postcard Cabins Talladega Valley in Alabama for a full month so he escape the noise and focus on writing a new album in nature. Here’s what he had to say after week one of his artist fellowship.
The first week of my fellowship, I was determined to focus on two things: 1. Generate as many musical ideas as possible 2. Exist in my cabin without pressuring myself to do too much of anything.
Obviously, these goals can seem contradictory. I certainly came into the fellowship with ambitious ideas of what I wanted to accomplish in the four-week time frame (i.e. write and record an album), and since I had done a short stay with Postcard Cabins in 2023, I felt like I had a head start mentally with ideas being sparked by the memory of my previous visit.
But immediately upon arriving the first night, I was struck by a revelation of sorts: There’s a difference between the experience of actually being in a tiny cabin in the forest and the memory of being there a year ago. All of the ideas I had preemptively been exploring were based on a memory that wasn’t nearly as potent as the experience of actually being there physically in that moment.
I knew at once that I needed to drop any kind of preconceived musical material that had been bouncing around my head in the days leading up to my trip and surrender myself to the experience.
I decided to worry less about the “generate musical ideas” part of my plan and allow myself to exist without pressure as much as possible. I played my instruments quite frequently of course because it’s impossible for me to go a day without playing music. But I also sat outside a lot. I read quite a bit. I watched squirrels and listened to birds and drank coffee while looking out of the cabin’s enormous window.
And the musical ideas began to pour out.
As those ideas came to me, I tried to jot them down in my notebook or record them roughly as voice memos without too much thought. I didn’t want to stress about them or worry about whether they would turn out to be useful or any good. I didn’t want to even play with trying to give the ideas too much structure or shape at first. I didn’t want any of that to turn into anything that could conflict with my plan to merely exist and be present.
As the week progressed, the ideas started to evolve on their own. Naturally, I found myself gravitating to certain harmonic or melodic or textural ideas, and I started to associate those ideas with the specific minutiae of my experience. I started to notice patterns in the world around me and started to recognize some of the creatures who would make appearances around my cabin daily.
I found myself wanting to record as many of those specific details as possible. I wanted to remember the hopping bird that jumped on my doorstep around 9 am every morning, and I wanted to remember the yellowjacket that buzzed around my head every time I sat by the fire pit during the day, and I wanted to remember how magical and quiet the night time felt. I wasn’t necessarily interested in recording the facts of what happened (I don’t know enough about nature to even begin to accurately describe any of these things from a scientific perspective), but I wanted to capture as much of the feeling as possible.
You can listen to the full album Bradley created at Postcard Cabins here.