a group of ducks floating on top of a lake

Inside the Sessions

Every track begins somewhere — with an idea, a feeling, a story, a voice or a character. Here’s how we shape it into music.

Who Are the Voices?

Not All Artists Want The Stage

There is no single answer to who — or what — you are hearing on a Sessions on the Green® recording.

Some of the voices belong to real people.

Parichad, for example, is a real performer. She enjoys making music and contributing to the work, but is not looking to continue her conventional career in the spotlight. She does not want to tour, build a public persona or turn herself into a product that has to be constantly promoted.

She simply wants to make music.

Sessions on the Green gives her somewhere to do that.

Her recordings may be shaped and enhanced using contemporary production technology, just as recorded voices have long been shaped through microphones, equalisation, compression, reverb, editing, pitch correction, Auto-Tune — with generative tools now adding new possibilities to the studio process. The tools may be newer, but the person behind the performance remains real.

Other voices within Sessions on the Green belong to recording characters and musical identities created for particular songs, styles and worlds.

And that idea isn't particularly new either.

Ian Fleming created James Bond. Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes. Neither character was simply his author wearing a different hat. Each developed a recognisable personality, history and world while inevitably carrying something of the imagination and experience of the person who created him.

Cinema takes the idea further still. Neytiri in Avatar exists because Zoe Saldaña's performance, writing, direction, motion capture, animation, visual effects and hundreds of creative decisions come together to create someone audiences can believe in emotionally.

And we all understand that Vin Diesel didn't actually drive through every explosion, perform every impossible stunt and somehow avoid all those bullets.

We don't feel deceived by that.

We understand that filmmaking uses actors, stunt performers, editing, visual effects, computer-generated imagery and increasingly sophisticated technology to create an experience that never literally happened.

Those are the tools of filmmaking.

Music can create worlds too.

Sometimes that world begins with a real performer. Sometimes it begins with a character. Sometimes with a lyric, an instrument, a rhythm or simply an idea of a voice we haven't heard before.

That freedom has allowed Sessions on the Green to explore very different musical worlds — from the poised, beautifully articulated British character of Scarlett Bentley, through the Latin warmth of Carmen Solé, to the expressive contemporary soul of Gabriel La Voz and many others.

They aren't all created in the same way.

And they aren't supposed to be.

What connects them is the creative process behind the music: writing, imagining, experimenting, choosing, rejecting and deciding what belongs.

Technology gives us more possibilities than an independent studio could have dreamed of even a few years ago.

But possibilities still require choices.

The means of bringing a voice to life may change. The responsibility for what we create remains ours.

Every Track Tells a Story

We don’t always know how it’ll end.
Sometimes, we don’t even know where it begins.

An idea changes. A voice appears. A line is rewritten.
Something unexpected becomes the part we keep.

And eventually there comes a moment when we stop changing it.

Not because it is perfect.

Because it has become what it needed to be.

Then we let it go.