scruffian

This album sounds like it was discovered at the back of a dusty attic. I have been carrying these songs around for many years (19 in one case). They had been slowly rusting on my hard drive until I met Ross Viviano in 2022 and he offered to mix them for me. I told him they were just a mess and not really good enough, but he took them on anyway, and has pieced them together to a point where the are (in my opinion) worth listening to. Amazingly he’s still managed to keep the corrosive and dusty vibes.

Ross also played drums on all of the songs that have real drums, which makes so much difference.

The cover was taken in a derelict house that we almost bought but then didn’t.

You can stream it in all the usual places, or download it for free from Bandcamp.

Curing

This song began summer 2021. We were still somewhat isolated because of Covid, but it was a beautiful summer day so the family spent most of the afternoon in the paddling pool. Usually I would take the opportunity to do lots of jobs in the garden at times like this but intead I just took the guitar and amp into the garden and started recording whatever came to me. The vocals came later, pieced together from haiku from around the same time.
Fortuntately I got a picture!

Bramblers

Bramblers began in summer 2017, while on holiday in the Forest of Dean. We were staying in a yurt which was pitched in some lovely grounds, and this riff developed while walking round the grounds. The words came a few years later while going on lots of long walks with my infant son.

Woodfire

In August 2018 we went to Woodfire camping. I was up at 6am every morning with my infant son and we got a good 2 or 3 hour walk in every day before the rest of the family woke up. We explored the South Downs quite extensivley particularly the barrows on gallows hill. This is a love song to camping!

Can I Get Over This?

One evening in August 2020, again on a camping holiday, as we were getting ready for bed, the sun came out low and threw these long golden shadows across the campsite. We played frisbee much later than we should have and made memories that will last until we die.

Wild Swimming

In around 2016 I finally forced myself to learn Nightswimming on the piano. Its one of my favorite songs and I can connect with it even more closely when I’m playing it myself. I played it every day until I was breathing it. This song is really just a development of that one. It’s about as close as you can get to being a cover without actually being a cover! The electric piano is inspired by Beth/Rest by Bon Iver.

Loon

When I discovered that White Sky by Vampire Weekend is a rip-off of Crazy Love Vol II by Paul Simon, I gave myself permission to steal their bass line! I played around with it in different forms for many years and could never get it right, until I had a day to myself in Mexico waiting for my flight. I wandered around the beach looking at the graffiti and finally wrote some melody and words.

Up In The Misty Mountains

Another camping holiday, another song! This was in the lake district. I was trying to capture the sound of the mist rolling through the mountains. The organ part was recorded on an old harmonium – you can hear the pedals creaking and the bellows pumping. At this time I was trying to connect music to nature, and I was failing to find any coherent rhythmn in nature, so this was really my attempt to create music without coherent rhythmn.

Migration

This is the oldest song on the album. It was originally inspired by Atoms For Peace by Thom Yorke. I first played it on a piano when we lived in Kent and for a long time I didn’t know what it was about except for the line “we are not far from home”. Then one day on a late evening walk we saw a lot of these birds migrating south and it kind of clicked into place:

Time

I had a 3 month sabbatical in 2019. During that time I only wrote one song, this one. Somehow although I had no job to do, I still ended up with not a lot of time for music. My son was only 2 at the time and we spent the mornings together and I tried to go slowly and just enjoy being with him before he went off to school. One thing this experience also taught me is that unless you prioritise creative things they always get pushed to the bottom of list, which is what made me start writing a song a day.

Back To Our Phones

Before Covid my employer would gather all its employees from across the world into one hotel for a week, to work and live together and build stronger connections. The end of this week was always tough – having reformed strong connections with old friends we had to leave each other for another year and go back to our normal lives again. I wrote this song on the last day of the “meetup”, while most of my colleages travelled home.

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who helped make the memories and inspiration that have gone into this; the many camping holidays and long walks, the children growing older

Thanks also to all the musicians I have throughly ripped off. I put together a playlist of the “inspiration” for each song so you can see how similar some of them are!

Finally a huge thanks to Ross Viviano for all his work on the drums, mixing and producing this shambles into something listenable.