New interview with Bill Nelson:

Looking back over your whole career and all the music you’ve produced; is there any specific album you would pick as your favorite, and why?

BN: Well, yeah, I guess there’s an album called The Alchemical Adventures of Sailor Bill [2005] and that’s one of my favorites. And it’s because that actually started with an idea, rather than just going in and seeing what happened, I had this need to make an album that was in a lot of ways autobiographical about when I was a child or a teenager going on holidays to the Yorkshire coast and with my parents. And I have a lot of fond memories of those holidays on the coast of the Yorkshire and on the west coast as well, places like Blackpool. So that was the starting idea for the album. And I wrote the whole thing around that kind of loose feel and theme, and I wanted to have some of the tracks with a very grand orchestral mood to them. So, I came up with all kinds of string parts, and I actually subtitled it, Bill Nelson and his Lighthouse Signal Mechanism Orchestra. And that one, I do listen to that occasionally. I can listen to that because when I listen to it now, I can’t imagine how I did it. It just seems so complex and so dense and rich and lush, and I must have put a lot of energy and time into doing that one. And yet, I can’t remember, it’s almost like it was done in a trance. I can’t remember the process of doing it. So, that’s one of my absolute favorites.