Most of the tracks on It's Amazing... are upbeat and fast. I was fairly suspicious of what I referred to as "ballads" (i.e. anything you couldn't jump around to), which I think was a hangover from going to heavy rock gigs when I was fifteen. Anyway, this is the "ballad" on this album. Apart from We Have Our Lives, which is just weird.

Yes, I stole the intro. At the time I thought the chances of very many people hearing it were very slim indeed (the initial run was four, don't forget), and now I'm too old to care.

I don't think I've recorded River Rise before. The bridge and solo are a bit tentative here, but it would be of interest to people who've heard me perform it over the years. It was written, sort of, at Dan Buzzo's place in... well, a long time ago. Late 90s. We were messing about with soft synths and recording and so forth, and I started to improvise these lyrics. Dan cut the track into shape and posted the result to MP3.com (remember MP3.com?). I listened to his version and learned it from that.

Gravity was technically "the new song" for a long time after it ceased being new, largely because there weren't any other songs for that time. Obviously the chords had been bouncing around for a while, and a couple of the lines in the song attached to a completely different lyric which I'd had for a good few years. My natural tendency to hoard somehow precluded me from throwing out the rubbish lyrics and writing new ones to go with the ones that were left.

It may be necessary to confess that the bass is sampled, though I spent a long time tweaking the pitches so that it sounded like the sloppy way I play a real double bass. It certainly takes up a lot less space than a real double bass.

This track isn't available to download as a remixed version is on the CD Another Time and it seemed sensible to remove it. I might be wrong about that, I don't know. You can listen to the streaming version if you like.

In 1993 I recorded a lot of songs, which I put onto a cassette which was called It's Amazing What Some People Can Believe.

I'll be uploading the whole of it soon, when I've run it through some kind of shinification device in Logic. In the meantime here's the first track on side one.

It took me ages to find the Bb chord in the bridge. Obviously I know where Bb is (in between B and A, where it always was), but I knew I wanted a particular chord there, after the Bm, and couldn't believe it would be Bb, as that was right next door.