When This Is Over: This was the album that started it all. Even though the material for ‘…Are Still Missing’ had been written and recorded before this, it lay stuck on a hard drive, unmixed and unfinished. The Covid 19 lockdowns happened and I found myself in a house share, driving to and from work to teach via video link in an empty school. To raise engagement with my students I asked them to send me the music they were listening to and the penny dropped after receiving lots of YouTube links to lo-fi recordings. I shook off the limitations of the home studio set up and embraced the fuzz, the buzz, the creaks, the noises in the house and outside and decided to write an album on the current situation.
All the lyrics were crammed onto two sides of A4 paper and took three different perspectives on the lockdown: the present situation, reminiscing on the past, or dreaming of the future.
Musically there was a clear direction on this album – I’d been doing a lot of co-writing for pop, country and musical theatre in the year leading up to this album and had been working within tight structures and formats for what sells. Three and a half minutes, with specific hook placements, repetitions and patterns. I wanted this album to be the opposite of that, at every time I felt an obvious right-turn coming in the arrangement I deliberately took a left. The justification for these decisions was that I needed to indulge in music that brought me joy, rather than fitted a ‘cookie cutter’ design of what a song should be – so all the songs on this album are a little wonky. The Covid lockdown was largely a very boring time – so why not allow the music to go in unexpected directions in their arrangements?!
There are tempo changes, long solo sections, dance breaks, steel pans, synths, panpipes, glasses of water hit with chop sticks – nothing was off limits. I roped my housemates into doing some shouting backing vocals on a couple of tracks, and the briefs for each track ranged from ‘lethargic 80s synth indie rock’ (When This Is Over) to ‘surreal yogurt advert music’ (Monkey See, Monkey Do).
They’re a strange little collection of wonky and wobbly songs, but they capture a time, and the need for an artistic escape.
I hope you enjoy them.
Find the lyrics and stories behind the songs below: