With one week to go for the people of Frome to raise £1.5M to buy back their town centre, I released my first POP SONG in support of the visionary project.

As if “Vaishnavi” + “pop song” wasn’t enough of a surprise, literally as I was announcing it on the 1st July, a text came from my sister that an old warehouse on the site had gone up in flames with eight fire engines battling the blaze 😳

It honestly left me rather stunned to see the alarming images… this part of Frome that is such “hot news” right now ACTUALLY ON FIRE 🔥

Thankfully no-one has been hurt, although the historic old silk mill is badly damaged. That’s rather a tragedy because it was a key part of the regeneration plans, which are lovingly honouring the historic commercial centre of the town (where I’m sure a commercial property developer would demolish everything and start again).

The GOOD News

So it’s taken me a minute to gather myself. And - as it happens - today feels like a wonderful day to finally share the song because I just read an announcement from Mayday Saxonvale 🤩

Learn More about MAYDAY SAXONVALE

The Song

So here it is - my first POP ANTHEM!

Feel free to listen and not read further but I’m going to ramble away a bit about how this song came to be - and the unexpected journey it’s taken ME on!

Find Mayday! on all music platforms

(The full Lyrics are below)

The Story of this Song

I care deeply about the future of Frome - my mother actually first moved to the area in the late 60s and, although I was born in London, we moved back in the early 80s.

But beyond Frome, after the first Mayday Saxonvale meeting I attended, I imagined: if we could pull this off here, this sets a precedent for towns EVERYWHERE to reclaim their power and determine the future of their local area.

How amazing would that be?!

Call me biased but if ANYWHERE can pull off something this ambitious, I believe it’s this rebellious and “renegade Somerset market town” Steven Morris, The Guardian

“THAT Town”

“Frome’s got a good track record of being quite rebellious and pushing against conventions.” Paul Oster, Director of Mayday Saxonvale

“The capital of so-called flatpack democracy, grassroots DIY politics” (Tom Dyckhoff, Guardian) was voted #1 Best Place to Live (in the SouthWest) by the Sunday Times in 2021 and established the first-ever Share Shop (library of things) and the first community fridge.

“This is a completely different model in the sense that it’s community driven but with a team of professional professionals alongside us. So you’ve got the local knowledge but with professionals that can deliver it.” Paul Oster

One Morning of Passion

At that meeting, I was blown away by what a thoughtful and professionally-executed vision it is. The attention to detail was so far beyond what a profit-driven developer would consider. I had never imagined this could even be possible, that locals could come together and design a future that would actually serve the town.

I was so fired-up that went home and scribbled down some lyrics for a song about it!

These are my notes from that day in 2022. I didn’t get anywhere particularly inspiring…

It wasn’t until I received an email in autumn of last year announcing that Mendip Council would put the site back on the market that the panic hit me that this could possibly slip through our fingers. I sat on my sofa and wrote the song in full - in one morning of passion.

This is the rough draft from that day in December 2025. The part I most loved was almost like a rap - not something I’d ever written before:

Eye-Opening

This project has really opened my eyes. While the words “property developer” had a vaguely negative association in my mind, I hadn’t ever thought about the fact that the provision of homes for people is usually a commercial business. We’re fortunate enough to have not-for-profit healthcare in this country and I started to wonder: why should shelter - a basic human need - be any different?

I moved out of Frome 3 years ago, largely because I couldn’t find anywhere affordable to live. I return to visit my mother, sister and friends regularly. On a personal level I would like Mayday Saxonvale to succeed so could hopefully one day return. But more than that, I want this for the world.

This project is blazing a trail for completely rewriting the script of how housing happens!

After months of self-doubt, I DID finally record the vocals in my bedroom last Sunday and, with the help of an incredible producer, brought forth the song 🤩

I’m going to write another time about how this song has “worked me”.

“Vaishnavi Brassey the protest singer: whoever saw THAT coming?!”

And if you haven’t already, you can go back and listen to a very rough early acoustic version that I posted last year:

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Lyrics

It started by the wooden crocodile on the riverside at sunrise
A Beltane group gathered to find solutions to the housing crisis
Can’t help but wonder why people’s homes are a commercial enterprise?
Don’t wanna go to war but what do we do when the frontline’s our front door?

CHORUS: (So we’re shouting...)
Mayday! Mayday! Save our town! We won’t back down
Mayday! Mayday! Don’t let our flagship run aground!
Mayday! Mayday! Saxonvale should be a lighthouse

A cobbled street that has a stream running through the middle of it
Traders outgrow and have to leave and with them all their profit
Can’t fault the local plan: create more jobs, business to expand
Don’t wanna rock the boat but this brownfield has always kept Frome afloat

CHORUS

The system is broken so we got all the folk in
And asked what they needed and with this we seeded
A mixed-use bespoke plan, the locals have spoken
Community spaces, no bland-box estate please
Provision for flood plains, a vision that sustains
No to your loopholes, power to the people
Our hearts are burning and the tide is turning
Don’t need your Acorn, we’re planting an oak in our town, our town
There’s no place like home, we’ve a beacon of hope for towns, all around

CHORUS (So we’re shouting loud...)
Mayday! Mayday! Let’s own our town, and not back down!
Mayday! Mayday! Don’t let our flagship run aground!
Mayday! Mayday! Saxonvale could be our lighthouse x 3

A beacon of hope for towns, all around x 2
A beacon of hope…

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It was brutally disappointing to realise I had to cancel a week ago due to a pile-up of physical and logistical obstacles. Especially as we had only realised weeks after setting the date that it would be International Women’s Day - which is extremely relevant to the song.

Woman In This Skin is a touching three-part harmony exploration of what it is to be a woman living with the effects of trauma, how our bodies don’t always do what we want them to and how that be challenging in our relationships. So I hadn’t realised but it’s actually entirely on theme that I had to reschedule!

If you can’t see the whole song, you can upgrade (feel free turn off email notifications - I SO get it!) If you can’t stretch to £3.60/month, use codes Friends 50% or Friends FREE for half-price or free access.

So, although I don’t yet know when we will capture this magical song, I just had the thought I could write about it today and share a video of it with you - and celebrate it in that way at least! (Thank you for bolstering me in this morale-boosting moment).

For those of you that enjoy my stories, I’m going to go back to the beginning - the rest of you can simply enjoy the previously-unreleased video!

Last March I had the unexpectedly inspiring experience of joining 14 other phenomenally talented songwriters on a 5-day retreat with Chris Difford. I grew up listening to my father playing Squeeze and - even as a teenager - I was always delighted with his quirky, creative lyrics. I remember giggling uncontrollably when someone explained to me the metaphor of “pulling mussels from a shell” (too X-rated to spell out in this post 😜).

The retreat was all the sweeter for a number of reasons:

🤩 It was hosted in stunning Georgian Manor Pennard House where we were force-fed full English breakfasts and 3-course meals and crashed at the end of long days in vast, high-ceilinged bedrooms. There’s definitely something to be said for how much more expansive and inspiring it is to be in large, light-filled rooms or wandering through beautifully-kept gardens - all walking distance from Glastonbury Festival’s pyramid stage.

🤩 The entire retreat was funded by Help Musicians, a charity which I discovered was set up by one of my favourite composers, Elgar. It was prompted by the premature death of one of his orchestra members and the widow not even have the funds to pay for his burial. Elgar set up this organisation and it has grown and expanded and continues to support musicians in all sorts of wonderful ways. It was humbling and beautiful to be supported in this opportunity.

🤩 When I attended the group interview on Zoom I was bowled over by the energy in the virtual room. Even before anyone spoke, I could sense I was in quite a powerful crowd! I didn’t expect to get selected and when I heard I hadn’t make the cut I wasn’t all that disappointed. But then a few weeks before, someone dropped out and I was offered a place. So the whole thing was quite a sweet, last-minute surprise.

But I was also significantly terrified 😱. Songwriting had always been a resolutely solitary endeavour for me. I had never shared my songs until they felt more or less complete, and then only with very trusted family and friends. (I hadn’t realised until writing this but the fact that I am sharing these unfinished songs with you now on Substack is thanks to this experience!)

So I had absolutely NO IDEA whether I was even capable of songwriting as a collaborative process. But I really wanted to find out because I have found collaboration so energising and fun in many other ways - including screenwriting and vocal improvisation.

The way it worked was that Chris would pin lists of groups of 3 after breakfast and that was our co-writing group for the day. He also gave us some kind of direction or theme and the rest was up to us…

After dinner, we would all gather in the giant drawing room (yes: crackling open fire, giant oriental rugs, sofas swallowing you whole… all that jazz) and perform our freshly-pressed songs to the rest of the group - including Chris 😳

It sounds horrifying but it works. In a strange way, the fact everyone knew we had only had a few hours to write a song helped me give myself permission for it to be mediocre. I really leaned into that on the first day. So it was a wild surprise to discover that not one of these songs were mediocre. In fact the evening “concerts” were an edge-of-your-seat, gripping, sensational set of performances.

Five incredibly accomplished songs. Night after night.

The standard of talent in that Manor House that week freaked us all out to a healthy degree. It was both thrilling and petrifying to be running with this pack of genius creatives. Even Chris was being moved to tears and was vocal about his genuine excitement and thrill at witnessing the unfolding magic each evening.

I’m amazed to report that Woman in this Skin was written in less than 3 hours. We were encouraged to spend some time getting to know each other and on the day I was matched with Lydiah and Molly our brief was to find a shared experience and write from there.

The morning was a mini-convention of Oversharers Anonymous as we dived into some vulnerable waters of trauma, relational challenges and shared pain. We found a clear thread that wove us all together and, after lunch, began to reel the song in. The video above was our final rehearsal, made just before we headed down to dinner.

One aspect I found fascinating about co-writing is how different everyone’s process is and how uniquely everyone works. Lydiah began with the guitar riff which was super intriguing to me because it’s in Drop D turning, something I’ve never explored. Molly blew me away with the speed with which she reeled in the lyrics. I remember at one point fearing that I hadn’t brought much to the process but later realised I had come up with the chorus 😅

I also learned a lot about myself in this journey - both my strengths and my weaknesses. Some of this was confirmation (lyrics are my strong point) and some of this was surprise (I can co-write songs!)

Harmonising with these two was a dream. I don’t even remember one word being exchanged on the subject - we simply found our place harmonically quite effortlessly and I don’t think anything was decided or changed - the interweaving melodies just emerged complete.

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LYRICS

Here they are from the notebook I had in the songwriting session:

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I’m sharing a new song that popped in on Saturday… still a work-in-progress..

But this is the challenge I set myself, so here it is.

This likely won’t make sense to many of you without background information but I’d really appreciate you listening first and letting me know what you get from it “blind”. (If you want to then understand more, you can on the Mayday Saxonvale site.)

I had the inspiration to write a song championing this project over three years ago and got in touch with them then - but never followed through. After a worrying update on Saturday, the song suddenly landed! I’ve sent it to the team there but haven’t heard back yet.

I’d REALLY appreciate your feedback in the comments so that they’re all in one place for me to revisit (this is a small group of 15 peeps and won’t be seen outside this group). And you can also message me directly if you don’t feel comfortable with that.

Sometimes I listen to it and think it’s a really great little…

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If you don’t know what The Sycamore Gap refers to you might want to read the first two paragraphs on Wikipedia or Google it.

Like many people, I was shocked and horrified when I first heard about the felling of the tree. I felt a fury towards the mindless hooligans that had destroyed 150+ years of growth overnight.

But in August I had an IFS (Internal Family Systems) session and encountered a truly MURDEROUS part of me. It was really shocking how violent and sociopathic this sub-personality seemed to be; how much she wanted to hurt and kill. With skilful encouragement from the therapist I was able to befriend this part, learn about her experience and finally reach deep compassion for the pain she had endured.

Two days later this song popped out. It feels to me more integrated than my other songs to date, …

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It’s an open letter to our speedy species inviting us to slow down - and I’m very much included in the intended recipients 😜🏃🏽‍♀️

The only area in which I have NOT had the zoomies is in getting this song released: it first landed 13 years ago and was recorded over 2 years ago. I’ll write more about that journey another time…

LYRICS

VERSE 1: There are no angels, there are no sinners
No bearded judge in the sky and no winners
Dear Human Race, open your eyes
There is no finish line in life and no prize

CHORUS: So why are we running, where are we going?
Full speed ahead without really knowing...
Why are we running, where are we going?
The only urgent thing we need to do is start slowing...

VERSE 2: We’re hooked on the future a…

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I’m going to write about that next but I realised there’s some “me and trees” backstory to fill you in with before I embark on this latest chapter…

In 2008, I caught my first song. Prior to that I had wrenched some songs out of me, as much a cathartic, therapeutic process as anything creative. A way of expressing the otherwise incommunicable. I had found a way of allowing myself to be “seen” in my truth that felt easier than having honest conversations. And a way of cryptically expressing certain secrets I didn’t want to have to keep.

But when If Trees Could Talk fell out of the ether, it was different.

It poured into me and through me: something that already existed in its entirety.

My role was immediately evident: to “transcribe” and catch this piece of wonder. Later, there was a refinement process - of deep “listening” in order to tweak some words or bits of melody I may have misheard in the original download - but the song essentially arrived fully-formed.

I have since likened this process to excavation: you happen upon some buried treasure and, although it’s immediately fairly obvious what sort of thing you have discovered, there is a slow and delicate process of dusting, brushing and scraping required before you can marvel at it in all its dimensions.

Later I reflected and realised the seed for the sentiment for this particular song had been sewn in 2005 when I spent some time in Northern California. In particular, when I took a breathtaking stroll through Muir Woods: a protected pocket of the vast Sequoias, often known as Coastal Redwoods, that once lined most of this coast. More than any human-made cathedral I have been in, the presence in this place was staggering. I felt hushed into awed silence and my mind struggled to grasp the scale of these towering… “beings” was the best word I could find to describe them.

Dwarfed by “General Sherman” in Sequoia National Park, California 2009

Learning that some of these extraordinary trees live to over 2,000 years old I was amazed to imagine that they were actually on earth at the same time as Jesus! Some years later, I stood with another Sequoia “General Sherman”, the largest living tree on earth (by volume). At approximately 2,500 years old, this vast repository lived concurrently with Gautama Siddartha, the Buddha. Unbelievable!

I wondered what on earth these silent witnesses would be able to communicate to us if only they could speak.

At the time, that seemed like a hopeless wish, an impossible dream. In the follow-up I’ll share how surprised I have been to actualise this “fantasy”.

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(Feel free to listen to the song while you read the rest of its genesis story…)

🌳🌴🌳🌲🌳

Of course the history of me and trees goes back much longer. Like many children, climbing them was one of my favourite pastimes. And when my mother relocated from London to live in the middle of a woodland in Somerset, I spent a lot of my weekends in a treehouse or wandering through the towering beeches surrounding her cottage, awestruck.

I’d found a way of stopping my overactive brain in its tracks 🙌🏼

At secondary school, one of my closest friends nicknamed me “Tree” and still calls me that to this day. When she first heard this song she interpreted it to be about me. I quizzed her about this recently and she said it was twofold:

Firstly, my contradictory nature - being both highly voluble and verbal (I would NEVER be so stingy as to use one word when ten would do) - yet those that are close to me encounter some mystery or secrecy… a dark-horse-ish holding back. She’s completely on point with that. I’m often quite a mystery even to myself!

The second aspect she pointed to is the profound wisdom that can flow through me at times (whilst at many other times I’m entirely capable of being an absolute moron). Although as I get older I find it easier to acknowledge this wisdom, I still have no idea where it comes from… (though there will be significant clues in part two.)

In my early twenties, I escaped a 9-5 air-conditioned office job for 3 weeks in Bali, meeting up with friends who were back-packing around the world. What struck me most on a bus through some jungly landscape was how thirsty my eyes were for “tree” and their vibrant greenness. I stared out of the windows for pretty much that entire 4-hour bus journey through Lombok: a starved woman, inhaling chlorophyll through my eyes.

In my later twenties, by which time I was well-and-truly weary of living in one of the largest cities on earth, I remember sitting on the top deck of a bus in solid traffic and longing to have more of the natural world around me. Suddenly, like the way your eyes adjust with a Magic Eye picture, the many large trees lining the Brixton streets came into focus. I was amazed to realise how many magnificent trees there ARE in central London. Yet they can easily fade into the background amidst the bright colours and lights that dominate the over-stimulating cityscape. From that moment on, I decided to consciously focus on the trees, the plants coming up through the cracks and began to see just how much the natural world IS present in our cities.

I didn’t discover until many years later that I was in fact living in “one of the world’s largest urban forests”! According to the Greater London Authority, this forest of London comprises of over 8.4 Million trees.

🌳🌴🌳🌲🌳

Although I sang If Trees Could Talk to close friends now and then, I essentially sat on the song for almost a decade, somewhat awe-struck by it and uncertain what to do with it. In 2016 I crowdfunded with Amy Bisazza and recorded and released our first mantra album as EARTH. It was a huge achievement and expansion, including an album launch at Triyoga in London. I felt totally ready for this - yet the idea of putting out just one of my own songs still filled me with dread. The stakes felt so much higher - both coming out of hiding in the safety of our duo and bringing my tender heart out of hiding with my own words. My inner critic was reverberating with projections of “Who does she think she is?” kind of vibes.

In 2017, after spending two months deep in the Welsh woodlands on an extended nature retreat, I couldn’t ignore that the trees themselves seemed to be imploring me to get the song out into the world. Of course I could be deluding myself but honestly it felt like that. At a fundraiser organised by a friend, one of the auction prizes was a day in a recording studio. It was impulsive but in that moment I suddenly realised this was a way I could “trick” myself into moving forward: I think I pledged about £250 and won the day in the studio. Somehow the excuse that I was supporting the protection of the Southern African white lions allowed me to “indulge” myself by recording my song.

So when I released it in 2018, it was for the trees, not me. I wasn’t that happy with the production (would I ever be?) and I was wracked with self-doubt but it seemed to be needed. And thankfully, I got another worthy cause to hide behind: Extinction Rebellion kicked off just at that moment and I decided to pledge all profits of the song to it. I also ended up singing it live on Southwark Bridge at the first XR blockade in London, significantly unnerved by the row of policemen behind me. As a perceptive songstress sister laughingly commented:

“Vaishnavi Brassey the protest singer: whoever saw THAT coming?!”

🌳🌴🌳🌲🌳

I had had a vision of a film to accompany this song from early on. I remember downloading some stock footage for it in 2012 but not following through. Having worked at the BBC and in film production in my twenties, I have unfeasibly high standards. I needed someone professional and competent to bring through my extravagant vision which I envisaged something of the style of Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book with various other ambitious influences. But so many things changed during lockdown and one gift I have seen many times over is people deciding to take matters into their own hands.

Perfectionism getting relegated to the back seat in a time of adversity and limitation.

And so, while largely in bed during 2022, I decided to use an upcoming deadline for the first Climates Film Festival to push myself to just get the vision out there, however imperfectly. As far as I was concerned, once I had completed it and submitted it for the deadline, the process was over. I had finally brought through this film after 10+ years of imagining it.

I went along to the screening and found the experience - especially the subsequent Q&A process - so excruciatingly exposing that I didn’t return to attend the awards ceremony. The other films I saw were much more professional and I felt I had achieved my goal. I had won against my harsh Inner Critic Chorus and highly-vocal Perfectionist Panel and made the film. So I was more than surprised the following day to discover that this simple film - that in my mind fell so far short of my original grand vision - had won an award!

You couldn’t make this up but the prizes for the Climates Film Festival were in fact… TREES!

The festival organiser kindly came round and presented me with this most adorable patio apple tree. I had no idea that trees could be portable… which has very much suited my lifestyle of recent years. The fruit is remarkably delicious and, at time of writing, she is laden with imminent apples. Because this tree is my height I’ve developed such a sweet relationship with her. I can see her in her entirety and witness the incredible seasonal changes she goes through. Each winter I can’t imagine there can be any life left in the bare bones and each spring she bursts forth with vibrant green buds miraculously.

This tree also helped me finally put down a heavy load of shame I had been carrying around it taking me so very long to get from catching this song in 2008 to releasing it in 2018 and then to finally creating the film in 2022. Witnessing her slow annual cycles of expansion and contraction I realised the highly obvious: that in “tree time” I have actually moved rather fast!

If you haven’t heard the song, you might - by now - be impatiently wondering what DO trees say, then?! Well that would be giving away the punchline of the whole song so you can find out below… in the “award-winning film” 😜

And, as of July, I have received a major upgrade in my understanding of what it is trees have to say. Hopefully Part Two will bypass “tree time” and come forth soon enough to not leave you hanging in suspense.

And, as a result of this recent experience, I’ve been wondering if I might have to create an updated version of this song with a new bridge….

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