Very rough, mostly single-take demos of pieces written at different times over the past 30 years. I started recording them during lockdown in 2020. The start of a process to turn basic ideas into produced tracks.
The outro theme and lyric evolved from a bit of noodling around on the guitar in January 2023. I developed the song over the next few weeks. It was a very slow process, due to many family commitments, which kept me travelling up and down the country and out of my little studio at home. I knew right from the start that this was a song about dementia. A very close family member had been diagnosed with young onset Alzheimer's and it was prominent in my mind at the time.
'I've An Idea' is built around two unrelated musical ideas I've had kicking around for years; a rhythm guitar chord progression and a lead guitar riff. The 'whistling theme' originated from a bit of noodling on the guitar in 2015; it spent the next five years as 'Riff Number 1'. The main chord progression dates back to 1992 and bore the title 'I've An Idea' right from the start. It wasn't until early 2021 that I hit on the idea of combining the two. The rest of the arrangement came together very quickly after that and I completed it in one day, recording the initial demo straight away.
'The Buccaneer' resulted from my experimenting with an open-G guitar tuning; I came up with a chord progression and the rest of the tune and other instrumentation popped into my head. Thanks to GarageBand I was able to get it recorded before I forgot it.
With 'This Time', I set out to write a doo-wop inspired song and to try a bit of vocal multi-tracking. Having recorded lead vocals, bass backing vocal and two backing harmony vocal parts I decided to have a go at doing a four-part harmony guitar solo. It’s all very unrefined, has a completely dry (and rather dodgy) lead vocal and needs re-recording from scratch, but I managed to get the basic idea down.