The road image on the front of the Miles & Weather album is a photograph by Andrea - taken through the windscreen – as we rolled up Highway 5 in Quebec (note that I’m driving on the right) one evening on the way to her family’s place near the Gatineau River in the summer of 2014. Early evening, storm front moving in overhead.
But strangely, as I think of the Miles & Weather time, I have another stretch of road in mind – going through Ballybogey in County Antrim and later turning left onto the Cloyfin Road towards Coleraine, at about 8.20am most weekday mornings. At which point I would often call Andrea from the car. She would have been asleep when I left around 7.15am, and I often wanted to hear her voice as I braced myself for the day to come. One morning she didn’t answer and I left a message, saying ‘call me when you get this’.
I often come up with song ideas in the car. As I drove on, I extended the line: ‘Call me when you get this… and tell me everything will be okay. I just won’t believe it from anyone else but you today.’
And I think… that was the start of the album. It seemed to capture everything that was happening to me at that time – all the weariness and anxiety, the endless driving.
Forgive the gloom, but this was one of the lowest points of my life, I think – my father had gone into an Alzheimer’s care facility in July and my mother was gravely ill (she died in November of that year, 2014). I was living in Belfast, working in Portstewart, staying at my parents’ bungalow for half the week, and playing shows all over the place, as well as ferrying my mother back and forth to various appointments, making hospital visits and so on.
So it felt like I was just living in my car. I would be thinking about where I would be sleeping for the next two nights, and what equipment I would need for the following few days, so at any point there were guitars on the back seat, overnight bags, amplifiers, laundry, medicine.
There are ten songs on this collection – the first and the tenth are love songs to Andrea, who pulled me down off the ledge on so many occasions. ‘Conversation with a Hurricane’ and ‘Walked Upon the Water’ are about my Dad’s condition. ‘Dear Amelia’ is about the loss of an old family friend. ‘Come On, Angel’ and ‘Great Big World’ are memory songs – childhood and later. Two of the songs sound like exercises in genre – ‘Train I’m On’ and ‘Cadillac Graveyard’ are fun, but they don’t really… sound like me.
By the time I got these songs ready for the studio, I was exhausted and had no idea how to record them – I just knew I wanted the whole thing to be stripped back, almost to zero. So there are no keyboards, horns, strings, special guests… there are real drums on one song – Chris Bradley was playing for someone else at the studio and Clive tried him out on ‘Conversation’ and we decided to keep it. Otherwise, it’s a series of drum and percussion loops, generated by Amie McClay who was assistant engineering the album.
I have virtually no memories of the recording process – apart from Clive putting some exquisite harmonies on ‘Bless the Road’ Every note of ‘Andrea’s Runway Song’ was recorded on a Korg digital recording desk by me, layer by layer, here in the same room where I’m typing this now. We recorded the whispered vocal for it at Clive’s, on one of his lovely old Neumann microphones (that song is still one of my favourite things I’ve done).
I asked Ken Haddock to take some bleak-looking head-on portraits of me, and he set up a backdrop and some lights, in a hired room at the Crescent Arts Centre in Belfast. I wanted it to look like Bill Evans on the front of Sunday at the Village Vanguard, but we extended that idea a bit. As we were leaving, I stood in the doorway of the lift and he liked that background, and shot a few of me in that location, too, with one shoulder holding the door open, preventing anyone downstairs from accessing the classrooms for ten minutes...
The photograph for the front was perfect – I had another image I had taken (I think from a plane window) of the runway at Aldergrove, and I used that on the booklet. Andrea did some lovely hand lettering, and it has since become one of my favourite of my album covers.
I toured the album with live solo shows through the spring of 2015, and reactions were pretty positive, although interestingly it didn’t really sell – of the various albums from that period, it’s one I still have a couple of boxes left of.
Striking a chord: Where my head was at the time - one of my journal entries from the period - an excerpt from James Salter’s novel All That Is
‘From start to finish, Anthony Toner‘s new album does serious mileage and covers some ground,’ said Julie Williams-Nash in her review on the Folk & Tumble website, ‘and as you’d expect nothing less from the bard of Coleraine, it’s poetry in motion… Betraying the worldly weariness of a life on the road and its tiresome journeys… [it] is a mature and finely crafted collection’.
It would take a couple of years before I was to process what had happened – and those were the songs that went to make up Ink in 2017 – more on that collection next time.
(A small quantity of physical copies of the Miles & Weather CD are still available from the SHOP page on this website. It’s also available to stream and download on Bandcamp, and on all the various main streaming services)