When Guy Baron aka Semi Precious became a father, life as he knew it shifted. It also transformed how he wrote and recorded his latest EP I Lost a Bird. For neun Magazine, he shares the beautiful process that culminated in some extraordinary new music.
I wrote most of I Lost a Bird while walking.
The first track began earlier, while travelling in Thailand, sitting near a swimming pool at night and sampling music that was playing in the background. When I came back to London shortly before my daughter was born, the process continued in a different way. We had just moved to a greener part of South London and I was spending long stretches of time outside, walking through parks and cemeteries with a buggy during the first spring and summer of parenthood.
I’ve always thought of myself as a bedroom producer, but with this EP the process became even more portable. Recording on my phone changed the way I worked quite quickly. I stopped worrying so much about retakes or trying to arrive at definitive versions of things. A lot of the songs began as quick sketches recorded while walking, usually while my daughter was asleep in the pram. The park became a kind of temporary studio.
Looking back now, there’s probably something lullaby-like in parts of the EP because of that.
There was something freeing about working this way. I had less time and limited access to my usual setup, and there was less distance between living and making music. Instead of sitting down to write songs in a more structured way, I was layering samples, recording ideas quickly and working with whatever I had access to at the time.
I think parenthood also shifted my attention in subtler ways. I started noticing things differently – greenery, weather, fruit trees, quieter environments near my new home. Even the cemetery where I was walking most days started looking almost exotic to me.
A lot of the EP was written during a period of transition, and I think that atmosphere stayed inside the music. There was the excitement of moving somewhere new, becoming a parent, spending more time outdoors, but also a feeling that certain parts of life had suddenly become more distant.
At the time everything felt slightly porous. Sleep deprivation probably played a role in that too. I was noticing ordinary things differently, and some of the new environments around me started feeling strange or dreamlike instead.
I think the EP also brought me closer to some of the earliest Semi Precious releases. Those tracks were made very instinctively, usually with minimal setups, samples and vocals, before I started thinking too much about genre or atmosphere in a structured way.
With I Lost a Bird, I found myself returning to that space again.
There’s probably a reason the EP is coming out on cassette as well. I had released the very first Semi Precious record that way, so the whole thing feels strangely full circle to me now.
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