The Sound of Recovery

i was heading home after meeting a friend um and just crossing a road uh that i have crossed i used to live in the area uh literally 50 yards from the road and so across that road thousands and thousands of times um and um from what i can remember i've got pretty much zero recollection at all of what happened um a scooter um or motorbike came around the corner um and i took the full force of the helmet in the into the face um and to the head i woke up in hospital 48 hours later i think and yeah i got a huge amount of skull fractures facial fractures um all my eye sockets my nose my jaw my cheekbones um my shoulder and a bunch of ribs um and then um consultants in the in the trauma department were maybe after a week of lining up sort of sending me home and my wife who is a uh at the time she's a pediatric um doctor at the time she was a senior registrar and she um uh sort of didn't like the look of how how i was uh um doing it and um demanded um that um

they do my bloods and uh and things and it and it transpired that um after many conversations or a few conversations and again my my condition deteriorating uh significantly uh that i had contracted meningitis as well in the hospital and so um thankfully um i wasn't sent home uh had i been sent home um you know i might not have made it back to the hospital or certainly without you know without some serious impact of meningitis so yeah it was suddenly um even more serious um and i was in hospital for i think just over three and a half weeks and i think above all the sort of psychological impact of it all was um was uh you know pretty significant you know when you go through something like that there's suddenly so many questions that are uh that come up of um or or emotions that come up whether it be um

the injustice of it or um the um the guilt uh you know i had i was so lucky with uh in terms of my long-term recovery physically uh there was you know touchwood there were no um lasting dramatic you know lasting uh um effects um aside from some sort of numbness and some um some loss of smell permanent loss of smell and things like that so um you know uh yeah the i think the mental um recovery was was you know took longer for me i'd say and you know still resonates today i think

i've i used to release a lot of my own music and my musical attention has moved to commercials and uh documentary and film uh compositions and things like that that the my the music i make for my self my real the music that really turns me on the really you know that i throw all of myself um into um has kind of had to take a back seat and i've been kind of constantly it's become a real frustration for me not finishing and releasing my music um because it's something that um uh you know it's the reason i got into it in the first place um um and it's my biggest passion um and so i um felt that you know one one of the kind of um you know lasting um uh

effects of my injury certainly i i'd say it was a huge confidence knock you know um for me just simply crossing a road uh um and it was only a single carriageway one as well you know with an island in the middle uh and and how i could have been so stupid to you know to to do that was a real it really knocked my it riddled me with self-doubt and and so obviously when you're putting so much out of yourself into a project like the music that i care about um it means you know to to lay yourself open to to scrutiny of your peers and things like that you know it was something i wasn't really ready to do so it's taken me a long time to do that and you know everything else aside raising a young family moving house a couple of times and uh and that sort of thing and like worth life work balance um that um meant that i

was becoming increasingly frustrated with not really making music for myself and finishing music for myself and over the years i've i've dipped my toe back into it and fallen back in love with some of the tracks and

and then got distracted again and left it like and it's been this constant struggle and i've been looking for um

a a a motivating factor and a an answer and a way to force my hand and to uh just to commit and to finish and to get things over the line and so it do it it came after a few full starts of you know setting myself really strict schedules and things like that you know we all know that's an impossible thing to do so um so i eventually um it dawned on me that you know by adding um a charity aspect to it and adding a uh something that's obviously incredibly close to my heart and close to the journey that's been that i've been on over the last um five years um in a way it kind of it takes that kind of just getting the thing out there finished drawing a line under it it takes that out of my hand in a way you know it's it's i've committed

to something to doing something so i've got to do it you know it's it's it's more than sort of just me you know um so it's um so that's the the reason i i did it and um you know fingers crossed it you know it's uh it's it's i got you know i can't begin to explain how wonderful it feels to finally finish some music and uh um that's nourishing me absolutely so to to to give um you know to do hopefully do some good with the music as well is yeah it's great it's a fantastic thing

the weeks i was in hospital with the injuries that i had i was there was a lot of uh staring at ceilings um and um being you know bored out of my mind so i i tried to occupy myself by um recording thoughts recording ideas on my phone uh recording little notes and and things like that and and then i started to just uh whether it be the night stand whether it be the jug of water or the cuts of water or uh you know even things like food packets that are you know think things that people have bought me or bits of the bed and things like that i just i just used a pen and was and i was sampling them directly onto my phone recording them directly onto my phone just single percussive hits and then i've got them um back to the studio and they um yeah i've used them in some of the tracks um re-sampled them and messed with them um um with all sorts of various software to

to um you know make them become percussive parts of the track or even just um take some of the audio um just sort of background noise white noise from goings on in the hospital and then really process them in the studio uh to turn them into um to turn them into textures within the tracks and things like that the main the main track on the ep the title track called retreat is uh is full of it yeah there's loads of it in there it's it's uh um uh all sorts of uh um i mean it's probably it's probably unrecognizable from where it first started out but it was it's certainly been been a nice fun thing to kind of um sort of weave that into the fabric of the tracks and it's you know it's quite a cathartic experience to kind of turn it into a positive thing such a such a negative experience you know so um so yeah it's been fun

it's available on all um of the major music platforms streaming platforms everything like that um the the one i would uh advise going to is bandcamp um because especially if you buy it um when the actual ep is released the same with the two singles they're on what's called band camp friday which means that um an even bigger nearly 100 percent of the revenue they don't think they like all platforms normally take a little cup of whatever the say it's a pound to buy the thing uh they uh they give an even something like 90 something percent of the revenue goes straight to the artist or hopefully in this case it will be to to headway so yes i would recommend um tracking it down on bandcamp which is franksonmusicuk.bandcamp.com

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