What's that? Most of you, most of the time, are not where I am. Our musician-listener relationship is purely digital. I don't like that.

Song Post is here to change that. I send people one new song per month in the form of:

• a beautiful lyric print
• an exclusive home recording
• a letter from me to you
• all printed and produced in a very classy way
• occasional extra poems and bits and bobs

So it's music in an envelope, the intangible made tangible, and it's an art experience for you. For me, it's also a community of people who love my work, and it's a way of funding my future work in the face of the precipitous devaluation of music and the exploitation of creators in the streaming age.

THREE CHOICES

The Original

€4/mth or €40 for a year

One winged envelope per month to your door, bearing song. Song Post in its purest form.

Digital Only

€1-3/mth

The same content as everyone but without the material costs.

All-Access

€10+/mth or €100 for a year (open ended)

Song Post + you get access to all shows and all releases.

Dear friends

The German for letter is "Brief", which is what these letters will now be. This one is mostly about thanking Gabriel, who designed and printed what you hold now. He and all of you are helping me realise my vision of a new way to make songs into things. We're close.

The song is a reworking of an old song that I was sick of and hated playing. But after a restructuring and retelling, it now takes on new life for me. It's dedicated to... I think you know who you are.

Yours pithily,

JEM BOSATTA

Dear friends,

welcome back to Song Post and the beginning of a new year. Thanks for sticking with me.

This coming month, I was supposed to go straight from England to Italy and be on the road for two months, scavenging for inspiration. So when I left Berlin, I sublet my room and packed away all my newly-unpacked things. But the pandemic has come in the way of my travel plans, and so I’m casting around for half-solutions until my room is free again in March.

Appropriately, the song that’s ready for you this month is Apartment. It’s about building a pedestal for someone else while trampling on yourself. While I was dwelling on that feeling, I quite spontaneously sung, “how d’you like the apartment?” and suddenly that story found its setting in a half unpacked room with “all these boxes piling high”. Living like that brings a melancholy of its very own, one I know very well, having relocated more than a dozen times in the last three years.

I don’t know why it feels right to join the two themes together. I’m trying to concretise a thought about being a settler or settling down, and feeling unsettled. But I can’t make it neat, and anyway I don’t want to pre-digest the song for you. You tell me: what is this song? what does it do? As ever, these are questions I am poorly placed to answer.

Yours unsettlingly,

 JEM