Songs from the programme:

The House of Coffee Sandman The Siren

Public performances

Karen's Blog

2012-05-26 The Impossible Songs

When I started composing songs, I discovered that any attempt to write a 'normal' song seemed doomed to cheesiness. Some while later, songs eventually emerged, filled with curious characters and extraordinary events. Sirens, swordsmiths, socks, acrobats and savants had their own tales filled with love, loss, greed, redemption, failure and so on and so on and so on. Piano accompaniments seemed to be mixtures of patterns. Patterns made by fingers across the keys and bits of styles from all kinds of genres. Writing a song felt like assembling a great jigsaw puzzle...... it certainly takes a long time. In the end, I landed up with a collection of songs that are impossible to describe or place in a genre. A couple of musicians commented, 'I've never heard anything like that before!' Snatches of imagination, pieces of life reinvented, bits of dreams, wild poetry. One night, I dreamt that I was flying and travelling to everywhere, using a piano as transport. The Piano Rocketship was born. Tomorrow night (Sunday 27th), I am performing my collection of songs (it had to have a title, so I called it) 'Pianorocketship presents: Songs From a Mirror World'), in an unassuming venue. I have no doubt that once sung, the songs will slip through the keyhole and dance along St. Giles, stopping at the Eagle and Child (favorite drinking haunt of Tolkien, C.S.Lewis and the rest of the Inklings,) for a pint. Who knows, they may even come knocking at your door in the middle of the night asking to be let in. Shhhhhhhh........... I haven't told the songs they are impossible, perhaps that will be their saving grace.