'Now For The Underdogs'

The central themes of this album are friendship, longing for escape, and vignettes of events that happened between Athens, Rome and Gijon (Spain) in the first half of 2024. Musically the aim of the record was to firmly acoustic and folk in intention. I’d made electronic and rock albums before and wanted the challenge of using acoustic instruments only. 

Around 25 songs were written in bursts of energy when the muses decided to visit, and anything that felt like a rock song was put aside to become a different album ('Ithaca - Lost Penguinos), and anything that felt like a folk song became part of this project. I looked to Bruce Springsteen's overlapping writing with Nebraska and Born in the USA as inspiration for this idea of two albums at once. The negative is that you can get swamped in too many songs and not finish them, but the advantage is that by writing a lot of songs and regularly working on them you're putting up your creative antennas - the muses will come, the more you do it. The trick is to be organised and to shelve some and work on others.

 Two particular friends had a strong impact on this album, encouraging me to try and mine the seams of inspiration deeper and present a more honest and raw truth, making the songs more direct. I hope I managed to do that. Musically I wanted to make a folk album and without fiddles and whistles I inevitably leant more towards using harmonica, mandolin and banjo which edged closer to North American Old Time music when I’d finished. This result wasn’t a conscious decision, more an accident of the instrumentation I was playing around with. 

I’ve been asked, whats the point in making music if you’re not pushing to be a touring artist, or famous, using this as your way of making a living? I think my answer is that I really enjoy making it, and at the time I just had to write these songs. The muses of inspiration struck and I listened to them. Many things in life were challenging at the time, but making these songs was a release, an escape, a deep focus, and felt really important. It was my purpose.

Through recording the album I created distance from the songs. I stopped thinking of them as ‘mine’ and they became songs that had come into existence and my wonderful task was to make them sound as good as I could, then release them into the world. The act of recording seems to remove the ego and it becomes more objective. Listening to the songs now gives me a lot of joy, and I realised that maybe other people might enjoy them too, so I decided to share them.

As of now there is no band to play these songs live, but maybe one day there may be…

Find the lyrics and stories behind the songs below: