Morning all!

Hope you're all safe, well and successfully swerving the plague. It’s all getting very near to baby time this end so it gives me great pleasure this morning to release this little mini album into the world!

I’m so proud of this little collection of songs and that I managed to make it all happen on my old tape machine in my back room. It’s been a dream of mine for a while to do this so I’m very chuffed!

The whole aim with this project was for it to be the opposite of the Follow The Leader album making process. FTL took two years to write, record and release (mainly because of the pandemic) and the production values were fairly full on; String sections, full band arrangements, proper recording studio etc. This time I wanted to do it as differently as possible.

I wanted to make something home-made, intimate, solitary and inward looking. I wanted to make music that was quietly content in its own quietness and not trying to be overly flashy or attention seeking. Don’t get me wrong, I’m so proud of FTL but after 2 years of making it, I wanted the new music to be quiet, still and thoughtful but almost most importantly, be made fast,

I first started getting obsessed with the idea of getting a Teac 144 tape machine after reading more about the Springsteen Nebraska album. I’d had a digital 8 track recorder as a teenager, and used it so much that I actually broke most of the buttons on it! I used to make at least a new album every school holidays and would even print out home-made artwork on the family inkjet printer to then fold inside an empty CD case. In many ways, I haven’t changed at all in 20 years!

I initially managed to find a 144 on eBay but when it arrived it didn’t work. I then found another but on the eve of it’s postage the seller messaged me to sadly say that it too didn’t work. My stroke of luck came when the seller then messaged me again to say that he’d happily post it to me anyway and if I could get it going again then fair play. I couldn’t believe my luck.

I managed to get it going again for about £200 and I was off to the races. I bought a handful of blank cassettes and started scouring the internet for PDFs of the original instruction manual so I could try and work out how on earth you worked this big clunky plastic thing. I found the instructions online and started to find my feet. When this machine came out in 1979 it was worth the equivalent of over £2000 in todays money and was the height of home recording technology, it was like a time machine!

Every time I sat down to record at the 144 I was flushed with all the rush and excitement I felt recording at home as a teenager. The limited track count was challenging but strangely liberating creatively, demanding a more minimalist approach. Adding to that, the very nature of tape and the fact that the speed changed almost with every playback meant that listening back to a take, or layers being built up slowly was genuinely like hearing something you’d never heard before. The process and the medium of the tape machine felt akin to the process of developing an analogue photograph in an old dark room; Watching the image appear from beneath the bath of liquid. It all felt like there was an invisible force was at play, gently moving and shaping every part of the process. Magic.

Musically I think the mini album nods to some of my favourite acoustic music and home recorded music from over the years. I can hear some Elliott Smith Either/Or, Tom Petty Wildflowers demos, Fionn Regan 100 Acres Of Sycamore, John Prine and Gillian Welch.

Songwriting wise, there’re things I don’t think I could have said in any other context. Some of it I wanted to say, some slipped out by accident. Some of the lines which I thought were merely perfunctory initially now feel some of the most exposing and vulnerable.

It feels trite to describe acoustic music or confessional songwriting as being like a diary but this really is a snap shot, a moment in time. Post lock-down, mid pandemic, packing up the flat, trying to buy a house, pre-baby! I don’t want to forget this time and how it felt so I’m glad you now get to hear it too.

Thank you so much if you’ve ordered a hand-made CD and a bag of coffee. If you haven’t already, I’ve left a handful more of everything in the online store.

So hope you enjoy listening (and drinking!) and can’t wait to hear which are your favourites!

Lots of love

Tom xx