I’m going to build this chapter of My Story over several sessions because it’s going to quite long and complicated to write.

Following the completion of Collateral I wanted to start to build an album with more….well, more bite. I have learnt a lot putting a couple of albums together and it had come to the point where I wanted my songs to have a harder edge to them. Not necessarily with a more ‘rock’ feel to them but definitely a more intense album. I had several song ideas I was working on but the one that came together the quickest was Just To Be With You.

To my mind Just To Be With You was certainly a departure from songs I’d previously written. The basis of it is a conversation between two people, one who can’t see the point of the relationship continuing and the other who would do pretty much anything to keep it going and how those two opposites are never going to reconcile, all set to the background of a long, night time car journey. The darkness of the subject matter, the soundscape of the music all fitted with the ideas I have about how the next album was going to fit together.

I had the title for the album – The Lessons – and Just To Be With You fits squarely into the overall concept for the album. Little did I know just where things were going to go from there…..

From the outset I knew I wanted to release all the songs from this album as separate singles. When I recorded and released my first album Present Tense I was still wedded to the old idea of an album full of songs from which you would release a few singles leaving the listener to catch up with your music through listening to the album. That’s not how things work these days. Thanks to streaming every song has become a single in it’s own right, there are no album songs, no fillers and no concept of putting together an album worth of songs which fit together around a theme or a style. Everything is stand alone and the idea that someone might devote 40 minutes or more to listening to just your music, to just one album is becoming more fanciful with each passing day.

I love listening to albums, preferably vinyl albums. I love the whole experience, the tactile nature of holding a physical product, the album cover, the turntable, the movement of the tonearm, they all resonate with me. But I’m in a minority. And my music isn’t yet available in this holy format. And even if it was I doubt many would purchase it. No, the reality is that music is streamed, often listened to as a background to other tasks and consumed song by song with the ability to instantly skip anything that is not immediately pleasing. The ultimate consumer experience, or so we are led to believe, or so we are conditioned.

There’s no point a solitary voice in the wilderness like mine kicking against that reality, the best I can hope for is to play along with the game and hope my music gets picked up and consumed the way the modern listener seemingly demands.

My next release was All The Love In The World. A more complex song than Just To Be With You and although the subject matter is different there is a synergy between the two songs. All The Love In The World is a deeply reflective song, looking back over the entirety of a relationship, of a life, and wishing all the crap had been cut out and just the important and good bits had been focused on. I’m immensely proud of the song and the sentiment it carries within it, and I wish I could have lived my life to those standards. But humans never seem able to, do we?