(Download includes PDF with lyrics and artwork)

This album started happening in early 2021, and kept happening, and now here it is. it emerged from the same things that my last two albums came out of, and it was recorded in much the same way, and again recorded alone, but it is a very different sort of thing, and it sounds different, there are more instruments in the mix, the arrangements have more depth, there's just more going on.

Largely it sounds as it does because shortly after God May Relent back in March 2020, I pretty much lost the ability to speak, and if I wanted to give voice to anything that was going on in me, well I had to find different ways of doing it, and so I found myself experimenting a lot, finding new ways of using my voice and new ways of playing and new instruments to play and new ways of playing with the sounds that resulted, all that kind of thing.

And Ye Are Not Your Own, the album of hymns and spirituals that I put out in the summer of 2020, was part of that experimentation, and this album of my own songs sounds like it does now as a direct result of what went on at that time also, for when my own songs started coming back to me, they came back to a me that had been to those places, and had learned some things out there and unlearned some other things, and had grown in some important sorts of ways.

Anyway. It's partly an album about the time it came out of, for that's the time it came out of, but it's about any number of other spaces and times too. There's a sort of North Antrim folk horror sort of thing churning underneath at times, but it can bound about a fair bit, so that we're in County Antrim in 1941, maybe, but we're in behind the black door of a special sort of cinema near Old Street in 2013 or so not long after, and the raiding is on the go, and ones are darting and the screen still pounding away.

There's also a fair bit of dialogue with "Yonder! Calliope?," which was the first album that my friends and I put together, back in 2007.

I felt like it had to go out into the world now, for I could easily be sitting with it still, six months or eight months from now, thing finished ages ago but I'm still telling myself it isn't, for if something has kept you afloat like working on this kept me afloat, well it's a bit scary being without it all of a sudden. But now is the time. I need to move on, and the album is finished. There'll be things to do with it happening across the months ahead, videos and things like this, but the big bit, the main bit, well that's it now. I can start to move towards other sorts of places, and all the things inside of the album can start getting their belongings together as well, and we'll all walk on in our own ways in love and all the richer in ourselves for where we went, when we went there.

So. If you give it a go, well I really hope you like it, and if you know anyone that you think would like it also, well I'd be really grateful if you maybe mentioned it to them. I'm not very good at that stuff, less good with every day that passes, so that would help me a lot. I don't mean ask them to pay for it. Just tell them it's there to be heard, if you think they'd enjoy it or get something from it or maybe even bring something to it.

Anyway. That's that.

Thank you.