The nature walk beloved by musician Alexis Taylor

Parkland Walk in North London. It’s a nature reserve and kind of woodland walk, which connects Highgate to Muswell Hill, and Muswell Hill to Alexandra Park, and Crouch End down towards Finsbury Park, Manor House. And it’s a place which I only discovered in the last, I don’t know, in the last five years or so. I started coming for walks and it‘s quite an easy way to get away from streets and away from traffic noise, not completely, but a little bit, and into a kind of woodland space, but still within London. One particular walk in this Parkland Walk is evocative of a time when I was working on a record and the record was all about silence and it was also about, partly about, Gospel music. And I suppose it was about absence and noise too. And so I would come and check the mixes, and check the performances on headphones whilst walking in Parkland Walk. So, for me, whilst looking at the trees and the path, and just enjoying relative solitude, although there are lots of people really that use the same walk, walk by, it was a place to really study a record and recordings and mixes, that’s all to do with peace and quiet in some way. So it‘s very evocative of the particular day I spent, and many other times too, but a particular day where I just listened to the album from start to finish, whilst walking on my own listening to it on headphones. And something about the surroundings and the music combined was very powerful, and also a way for me to really focus on the music I was making and listening to, and to put it into order, put it into sequence and make sense of it and check that it was, check that it was right. Check that it really was an album, that it was finished. And, so, after quite a long time making it, that walk, in Parkland Walk, was pivotal in me finishing the record.