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Marketing My Mid-Thirties Music Crisis
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Embracing the Poetry of Loss: Why England's Defeat is Our Greatest Victory
Rainy songs for the soul: A musical downpour
Clawing myself out of a hole, one task at a time...
Violence, oatmilk and the story behind the song...
Lyrical ideas in pop that should be outlawed forever...
Real-time ponderings from an English Wedding...
On checking less and living more...
On counting down...
The story behind the song...
On gurus and inadequacy...
The danger of ideas...
Thoughts on songs and Shane MacGowan...
Spotify, Ships and Star Wars...
Thoughts on social media, the Agricultural Revolution and dealing with the devil...
Exploring the limits of self-knowledge...
What Frank Sinatra and Italian cafes can teach us about growing up...
In the studio with self-doubt...
Things about trees you didn't know you didn't know...
Considering kings and chicken sandwiches...
Pondering a difficult question...
Why releasing music is a little like standing in a storm... ⚡️
Thoughts on time and how to befriend it...
An exclusive look 'behind the song' at our new single, 'Cut So Deep'...
My thoughts on the daily grind...
Why shooting a music video hungover is not a good idea...
My love/hate relationship with releasing new music...
Why everything doesn't happen for a reason...
Because popular music is no stranger to questionable uses of the English language...
Since setting out as a songwriter/recorder/releaser my social media feeds have become completely overrun with all things ‘independent musician’. This is a blessing and a curse...
I can’t help but be haunted by a darkly prophetic vision of the year 2030, or 2035, or 2045, or whenever it might be...
What about the now very conceivable world of the near future, in which digital pop-stars perform music of their own creation? In which the human being has been removed entirely from the equation? It begs the question: just how central is the human experience to the creation of art?
Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on the average microchip doubles, on average, every two years...
I tend to save my January introspection for the last week of the month. The first two I like to spend somewhere sunny and my birthday is on the 23rd. So, this week, I’ve been wrestling with my ‘new year goals’ and a line from ‘If’ has been ringing around in my head.
(The following poem was typed hastily into an iPhone in Senegambia, a tourist resort where the Gambia River meets the Atlantic.)
The venue is far too brightly lit and covered in plastic ornaments for my liking. It’s one of a soulless national chain of yuppie watering holes that appeal precisely to those lacking any imagination.
In Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys, Mr Irwin tells his Oxbridge hopefuls that, in the world of historical scholarship, ‘there is no period so remote as the recent past’.
In some real sense, the only thing that separates me from a person deem-able insane by productive society is the fact that my internal monologue remains internal.
On Monday night, following a fairly intense weekend, I was woken several times by a dream (nightmare?) that became serialised in the bouts between waking.
It’s no surprise to me that the ancient Greeks and Romans believed that seven typically capricious goddesses were responsible for artistic inspiration.
The music business has changed. Or so we’re often told.
The studio space we use is the dusty, three-roomed corner of a mysterious ‘business park’ near the Curry Mile where, I imagine, all sorts goes on without anybody really being able to describe precisely what.
Great lyricists can inhabit a character the way great novelists do. Occasionally, that character might be an amplified version of themselves; occasionally it’s an entirely fictional creation.
One of my favourite lines of Robert Browning’s has always been the often-quoted Andrea Del Sarto’s rhetorical question: ‘Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?’
Our beginnings seem to be the conjoined twins of our endings in internet pop-psychology. Every phoenix, by definition, seems to need its flames. One just can’t be mentioned without the other.