I uploaded one loop-based instrumental before (called Ridgeway) and this is another one. It was over six months ago, so it's acceptable, isn't it?

This is less uneventful than the other one, but is also considerably longer (so expect downloading to take longer, if that's what you go for). As before, it was written to go with a guided meditation, with definite sections to it that I tried to follow.

Background rather than foreground music.

As of this morning I had nothing to upload, and I thought I might have my first failure. This came together in the afternoon - I already had the chords and what I took to be the title, and filled everything else in as I went along, including the lyrics, which sort of emerged during the process like a Polaroid photograph.

One idiosyncrasy is that I took it as an opportunity to sync the MIDI clock to a freely-played guitar part. Rather too freely played, as it turns out. When I tried to add drums the tempo lurches made them sound drunken, so this is beat-free.

Meaning? No idea.

I think this was basically an excuse to use my new SansAmp, which I bought as soon as they appeared in the UK (£180, which was a colossal investment for me at that time). One of the few bits of technology in the early 90s that didn't disappoint me. But that only comes in for the guitar solo at the end (actually, I think that's double-tracked, but I may be wrong). The piano is a Yamaha CX5 (which only had a teeny little keyboard, and I was a clumsy person with big fingers). As for the lyrics... at the time I knew nothing about birds, trees or anything, really. It was supposed to be kind of folky, but that's quite difficult to achieve with a drum machine.

I think it was later my model for the recording strategy I used on It's Amazing - drum / bass / rhythm guitar bounced onto track four, then two vocals on track three, then one thing each on tracks one and two bounced stereo - except on that I used two guitars, on this I used piano sounds.

This is another very old one - one of the first ones I wrote specifically to be played on the nylon string guitar, I think, which must make it 1997. -Ish.

Very much influenced by the Ted Greene chord books that I was working through at the time - I was at someones house, working on an abortive recording of Jimmy, around 1995 (I was abortive, he was completely professional), and the conversation turned to mad chords. "You want mad chords?" he said, "Take a butchers at this!" and thrust a copy of Chord Chemistry into my hands. Which slightly blew my mind - I bought most of Mr Greene's books over the next couple of years (I'd especially recommend Modern Chord Progressions, which is exactly what it says on the cover). Many of those progressions made their way into my songs around that time, sometimes transposed from smooth-jazzy to accompanist-style.

The original, un-enhanced version is on Plucked

Not sure why I decided to re-record it, though I'm glad I did, or I'd not have found the horn section or the vocal harmonies. I used computer trickery on the vocals, by the way - thought I'd warn anyone who is offended by suchness.

Also note the cheesiest available synth setting.

Finally I've made a recording that I would without any equivocation have despised when I was 18.

Well, I promised a track every week, and had intended to upload a song this week, but have been down with a lurgi that's negatively impacted my ability to either (a) sing or (b) do anything else. Well, not quite anything - this track started to happen a few days ago as I was propped up at the computer looking at my copy of Henri Mancini's book on arranging, noting what he said about doubling flute with marimba. Everything else sort of happened by itself.

It's called Trailing because it makes me think of a spy film, with one agent trailing another. I might be completely deranged in this image, though, I'm not sure.

It was a useful thing to do, though, to remind me that I have a lot of other sounds available - I must admit, I've been settling down to the same settings recently, and it was good to rediscover electronic drums and rumbly bass and other such things.

This is actually quite an old tune - I think I wrote it between Christmas and New Year 1999-2000. Wow. Very old then. Perhaps a year younger, now I come to think of it. I've performed it a few times, but usually reached a point where it all fell to pieces, provoking that cold-sweat-terror thing that I realised I wasn't going to get to the end. And usually didn't, or not without speeding up precipitously.

But that's not to say I didn't like it. There's also the fact that inside my head it sounded a lot more like this - drums, bass, piano, even (though not included here) a jazzy flute, perhaps rather than one lone guitar.

Also, there was the problem that it didn't have a name, which I've half-solved with the help of an online English-Portugese dictionary.

Special mention for the ultra-cheesy 70s string synth patch. I'm very glad I found that.

Not sure what I can remember about this - I'm certain that I have no memory of writing it, so it just jumped fully-formed into my fevered brain.

I think it was written using an open tuning (C-tuning, possibly), and the extreme compression on the guitar was deliberate. Or as deliberate as I got in 1991, which wasn't terribly. Also, I remember that the basic guitar was recorded stereo onto two tracks, but I can't for the life of me remember why.

And then the slide guitar, which was the same tuning again.

Now it might have been an electric guitar, or it might have been my acoustic guitar with a soundhole pickup. I'm getting reports from my back-brain that it was all done using the Flying V, but to be honest I don't believe that for a second.

All done in one evening, too, I think.

Again, it's all stuff that's seeped out of my subconscious, so I couldn't tell you what it's about.

I'm not sure how old this song is. I can remember playing it in the old VAC, so that would be about 2002. I recorded a simple guitar and vocal version with Juan a few years ago (part of the Stairwell Sessions, but I didn't upload it), and meant this one to be similarly stripped down, under controlled conditions, but as you can probably hear, that notion was quickly lost.

It's one of those songs that I have to explain to the audience isn't me - much like Pure is. This one even more so, though, because there's something borderline insane about the narrator. Consequently I'd like to keep my distance from it.

At the end of the day, it's all suppressed rage, though I'm not sure that's a mitigating factor.

There's one more like this, which I've not even thought of recording yet, though perhaps I should get round to it now.

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.

Another short guitar instrumental, so insubstantial it might well blow away. There's not really anything to be said, other than that it was written and recorded today (Thursday 24th) - I was working on something else, then noodled this, then realised I might as well record it, recorded it and then realised that it had better be this week's upload, because it fitted a nice narrative curve that way.

This is most likely the first song I ever wrote.

Well, no, I'm sure I wrote songs before that, some of them were very long, and might even be dredged up if this upload project goes on for too long, but this was the first song that I ever played to other people, certainly with any regularity.

It must have been in 1987, when I was regularly visiting Oxford (from Newport where I was at college), and there was a fair amount of playing going on, usually around Bill Brickey, who might find this entry one day, who knows. He was very encouraging, and in some ways this whole Quixotic endeavour (that is to say my writing, performing, recording and uploading songs) might be, at least partly, his fault.

I'd bought a steel string acoustic guitar with my earnings from the Oxford Holographics shop on the High Street (where I was working that summer), and immediately began to write songs, of which (as I mentioned before), this was the first.

Look, the lyrics aren't great, but I believe there's a statute of limitations on that sort of thing, which this falls well outside.

It was one of a batch of songs I recorded the following Summer, after I hired a four-track from Bristol, but this isn't that recording, this is one I did in the last few weeks, on account of a Metafilter Music challenge (to record the first song you ever wrote), though I've missed the deadline for that by months.

I'd intended to change the arrangement, but when it came down to it, I found that I couldn't. All I could do was beef it up a bit, which explains the rather strange sound. The solo is a lot more organised in the original, but hey, I'm getting relaxed in my advanced years. Beyond that, it resisted keyboards, other guitars or anything exotic.

Anyway, this is 2009 me covering 1987 me, and feeling auto-paternal and indulgent.

(I am actually immensely grateful to Bill for the encouragement, even to this day.)

This is the original version of this song, which I played solo later on and put on Plucked. This, on the other hand, I made on the four-track in about 1992 with lots of noodly guitar on it. Another one that I've buffed up from the mixed version (on account of the fact that the four-track doesn't work any more).

I not only had no idea that this one would turn out this way, I was deliberately working against it, but it seemed to be forming under its own steam and ended up unstoppable.

Started, of course, as a loop with the brass parts, which I thought might be a nice coda to something, but I kept finding new and unexpected elements - an oboe? Strings? A banjo? - turning up, although obviously I had to play them. All the parts are synthesised, of course, except the vocals and the banjo, though if bum notes can be taken as signifiers of authenticity, then the banjo is very authentic indeed.

This appears to be another attempt by my unconscious to nag me to do something, or at least give me what it thinks is sage advice. Honestly, I expect to soon find myself writing lyrics like "wrap up warm", or "eat healthily" or "be careful you don't slip in icy weather". If my unconscious is so clever, I wonder where it was when I was making all those questionable decisions. Cowering in the corner with its head between its knees, sobbing gently, I shouldn't wonder. I know I should have been. Why it's chosen to communicate with my via the medium of slightly lugubrious lyrics, I don't know, but it has, and there's nothing I can do about it.

The general jazziness took me by surprise, though. It wasn't originally jazzy, but has turned out that way.

I wrote this in 2003 on a long Guitar Craft course in a convent near Barcelona. Six weeks of unbroken sunshine (there was a Europe-wide heatwave that summer), which afforded quite an opportunity to go completely mad, which I grasped enthusiastically with both hands.

Anyway, I wrote this about half-way, perhaps two-thirds of the way through the course, and performed it at breakfast on the last day before everybody went home. There are a lot of performances at meals on Guitar Craft courses, which is an ongoing blessing or curse depending on the quality of the food and/or the quality of the music, and most particularly the length of the piece being performed.

It went quite well, and I did it several other times on different courses, usually at breakfast. The last time was in the gigantic dining room of the facility in Lunlunta, Argentina in October 2004, which went so well I was, frankly, shocked. I never performed it again (well, once, to one bewildered person in the same room in 2006). I began to shy away from being a lone ego coming between people and their muesli. Cielo is under two minutes long, which one can get away with. Any longer than that and the audience begins to gaze longingly at their food, become restive and critique the particularly self-absorbed performer with noises, laughter or, if all else fails, projectiles.

This version was recorded last Wednesday (August 19th 2009), after the Passport show. Although "after" is a tricky concept with this edition - technical difficulties meant that the show wasn't actually broadcasting, so I recorded it and I'll edit it down and play it next week (when Phil, the presenter is away anyway) from CDs. As the microphones were already set up, and having brought my guitar with me, I played Cielo to a small-but-perfectly-formed audience of Phil and a couple of members of the Chinese Tea-House Ensemble, who were playing on the show.

The noises in the background, which began just before I went for the take, and which I thought at the time might be a giant absentmindedly dropping a small car over and over, turned out to be workmen dismantling scaffolding. As the take was so good generally (with a couple of glitches) and I'd be unlikely to assemble the mood, the venue, the recording equipment and the small-but-perfectly-formed audience again in a hurry I decided to go with it.

I promised a track every Friday, and at the time of writing I have twenty-nine minutes to get this one uploaded.

I've been away. It's sort of an excuse kind of thing.

On July 8th we finished up the run of shows through the first half of the year with something like nine acts, of which I realised (with time running out), I was supposed to be one. So I grabbed my guitar, sort of tuned up, lined up a pair of mics and launched into a version of Gravity. So it's not without mistakes and unexpectedly chromatic moments, but that just adds authenticity, m'kay?

(Original, somewhat smoother version here)

How this one came about I don't know. It started, like a lot of the recent ones, as a loop, which I thought sounded quite James Bond-y. After I'd stretched it out to song length, therefore, I needed to come up with some melodramatic lyrics.

After that there was a long period of trying to make the mix make sense. But however much I tried to strip the mix down, I only ever seemed to add stuff, so I've decided to call it quits and upload it. I mean, the rational response to "How can I clarify this mix?" is not usually "I know, I'll add an orchestra!"

Another song from my unconscious.

Essentially, it began as an experiment with arpeggiators in the Logic Environment. One of the slightly daunting things with Logic is that you can open a panel (called the Environment) and see how all the bits are wired together. Except there's no actual wire, it's all a metaphor, but you know what I mean. This is what resulted from tinkering around in there one afternoon.

Again, seeing what comes unbidden from the deeper reaches of my psyche, I wouldn't want to have to sit next to myself, not that I'd be able to anyway.

The name came from a crossword setter for the Guardian. I hope they don't mind. Too late now.

I wrote the first two verses in the early 90s - not sure exactly when, probably around 1992 - and that was that for a very long time. I'd occasionally play through them and then stop.

Last year when I was having a burst of activity, I got the middle bit and the last verse. It felt a bit like they'd been withheld until an appropriate moment. Strange that. I've played it live twice, now, and it seems to work quite well, even at this length.

I'm not sure what the lyrics are about (again), but they seem quite Golden Bough-ish. So.

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.

A taste of the sort of thing I do when I go off on these courses. This one was written a couple of years ago - the name came from the writing process - going "back to the top" somehow became "El Topo". Only much later did I find that this translates as "the mole". This version is a demo I recorded, so it's all me, about eight times, with a minimum of worrying about niceties, which gives it a kind of rock 'n' roll feel. And, of course, it's probably taking you more time to read this blurb than it did to play the track.

Another wierd one, I'm afraid: firstly, the music was improvised into Logic one evening, and for a long time it was an instrumental. Then, after someone heard it they said that they thought it should have a story on it, so from that point on, of course, it needed a story on it.

A long time before I had the story, I'd recorded the chorus part - the original recording of that is the one going through the wierd filter.

Recently I got the rest of the words to go with it. Again, they're straight from my unconscious into a word processor, so I've no idea what they're actually about, but they sounds quite spooky. There'll be a lot more of that in the future. Sorry.

I think it's somewhere in South America, but can't really be sure.

Another one of those songs where I let my unconscious take over, which improves my productivity, but not without certain difficulties.

I originally intended it to be a song about hating school, or more specifically having hated school, but I suspect it's become slightly more sinister.

Anyway, basic tracks recorded towards the end of 2008, it was supposed to be one of the tracks I was going to do the vocals for with Juan, but the lyrics didn't quite get finished. Early-ish 2009 I added the strings, which made me very happy. Then they lyrics came in a bit of a splurge, and I recorded them last weekend. I think. And the guitar solo I did immediately before uploading it, largely because I'd forgotten to do it. I listened to see whether it would have been better minimalist, without anything, but I don't think so, really.

Mufti day was... perhaps still is... a tradition at school* - essentially for a fee (that went to charity) pupils could come in on that day not wearing school uniform. Because of my inherent resistive nature, and because I'd managed not to wear school uniform anyway,** I didn't actually do this.

Another one that was a chord progression and a title for a very long time. I don't know why lyrics lag behind the rest of the song so much. It's worth thinking about, perhaps.

*I'm sure you know this. This explanation is for the benefit of Martians, and the Chinese bots that seem to enjoy my site so much.

**Broadly speaking. I wore something that usually looked like school uniform, but didn't actually adhere to the rules. I was never challenged, which I found extraordinary, since I never even had an official school tie. Sometimes I wore the school tie of a different school. Actually I was challenged once, when I wore a black shirt and a flourescent yellow tie. It was suggested to me that that wasn't official school uniform and I had to agree. The following day I returned to wearing a plain black tie. I don't know if they didn't notice or whether they just didn't want to cause a scene, though that wouldn't be like teachers, would it? Not wanting to cause a scene?

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.

Like Free Time, which I uploaded last month, this is a long-term collaboration with myself - in fact, even longer.

I recorded the nylon-string guitar and the original drums (and an original bass, which I since abandoned, as I never got it to work even after hours and hours of tweaking. In fact it may have been where I discovered that if you have to tweak it that much there's not really any point in keeping it), in May or June 1998. It was very hot, anyway. I was recording in Cubase at that time, doing the drum track on a MIDI channel, which was fed into the trusty TR626 and then recorded back to audio channels (two separate ones, I think - this might have been before stereo channels).

I think the vocal was done a little later, at the same time I did the original lead vocal for Free Time.

I did the choir a little later - possibly 1999. There are about 24 voices there altogether. I liked the way, if you multitracked that much, you got a pleasing mush. I think it was fairly late at night, and very hot - I had to keep breaking off in order to open the window and get some air in. Actually I think it might have been a Sunday night, that went a lot later than I'd have liked.

I left it there, really, and abandoned it in favour of the stripped-down version that's on Secret Agent's Dream.

In 2001 I got a VG88 and Godin guitar, and while I was looking around for things to do with it, I recorded the electric guitars on this, and redid the bass at the same time (using William George Q's wonderful fretless bass). And the organ, that was added at this time, too. And there was a mix of that that I was listening to for a long time (this was still in Cubase). The main problem with this version was a legacy from the original version - what I call the Regrettable East Enders drum roll. You can probably imagine.

So a couple of years ago, when I was retrieving old Cubase tracks, I dumped it all into a Logic file, along with the original MIDI of the drums, which I edited a bit, and finally found a drum sound that didn't intrude too much. I could tweak some more, but it's probably best just to upload and be done with it.

Improvised pretty straight one night, in as many passes as there were instruments, choosing instruments from the World Music Jam Pack that came with Logic. Not sure why Persiana, as it's not in the least bit Persian (ironically, because it uses instruments from everywhere else, pretty much), but there it is.

Actually, tell a lie, that zither took a few goes, and I'm not sure I got it right in the end, but verité can be messy sometimes, eh?

There's not much to say about this, actually. Um. Originally a loop, that grew a bit one day until it was several verses. Also the melody was originally played on sampled wind instruments, and it sounded kind of jazzy that way.

Then the words just happened, as they sometimes do.

I added the vocal (which I later rerecorded), then an organ. Then, not sure what to do next I did the organ twice more, and decided to leave them all in to fight it out among themselves.

So a kind of vocal bagatelle, really.

This is another very old four-track song. I think this might have been the third time I tried recording it, and this one stuck. Actually the first version might have been better, but I think I turned the noise reduction on the four-track off for some reason, so it's very hissy. And anyway, the four-track doesn't work any more. So this is the version we have today.

I don't know why I did that with the noise-reduction, actually. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. I couldn't really help it, I was bewildered.*

I think it may have stemmed from a piece of dialogue for something that I'd fantasised, to the effect "That's probably the only song about n-dimensional geometry you're likely to hear for a while". And so it is. Not that I understood n-dimensional geometry any better then than I do now, though I was nearly twenty years nearer to the time I read Flatland, so some of it might have stuck, despite the bewilderment.

Also, I should probably point out that, although one can do wonderful things with modern digital technology, this is a four-track recording made by a bewildered young man in 1991, so we have to allow a certain amount of lee-way. In any case, I think we can invoke that phrase that used to appear on CDs when they first came out: "May show the limitations of the source material", which is a twenty-year-old TDK SA90.

And ultimately, of course, me.

*I spent most of the period 1979-2001 in a state of bewilderment. Occasionally, for a change, I switched over to befuddlement, but mostly it was bewilderment all the way.

I originally uploaded a guitar-and-vocal basic version of this a couple of years ago, so this is the bells-and-whistles version. Not that there are either bells or whistles. Although there are flutes, sort of.

For a long time, if I could get an excuse to perform using the VG88 I would, and I would do River Rise with a drone using the rudimentary looping facility that that box provided (much like I did on the version of The Sea I uploaded a few weeks ago). This recording is based around a more complicated take on the same thing - two drones, both improvised to what I thought would be the right length using the VG88, one of them reversed (I think - it was a while ago), and filtered and so forth.

It was a lot later that I added guitar and vocal, and finally the sample instruments, backing vocals and electric guitar.

The vocal was re-recorded during the long session with Juan, who said I should cut the guitar for most of it, and he turns out to be right - the nylon-string used to run through the whole song, but when it was removed it transformed the whole thing. I put it back for the bits it currently appears in because there was an obvious hole there.

There may well be an accompanying video to go with this, when I've got time and my computer is behaving itself. There's certainly a very fine picture.

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.

I uploaded the second of the two inconsequential guitar instrumentals I recorded some time ago. This one is slightly longer, a lot more melancholic and has a possibly unnecessary dub echo on it. I quite like it like this, and what I say in that department goes, at least on this website. It's the prerogative of the internet, and is possibly rotting culture from the inside out.

Anyway, these were useful things to do - at the time I wasn't really doing anything, and it was good to record something, no matter how small. And as I said before, I thought there'd be more of them, but there weren't. Ho hum.

This is a sort of long term collaboration with myself.

I recorded the basic guitar tracks, bass and percussivenesses in 1998 - I remember it being in the hottest part of the summer (I was recording a version of the vocal at the same time, and had to close the windows every time I wanted to do a vocal take, which was quite tough). The percussion comes straight out of my Roland TR626 drum machine - these were the days before I had any kind of soft synth, even a drum machine.

I added the high and slide guitars soon after. The high guitars are basically exactly the same pattern as the nylon string guitar, except in Nashville tuning (that is to say, the top three strings are tuned the same as normal, but the bottom three are tuned an octave up, which is what gives it that sound), which was originally used in Nashville studios to fill out the sound (or this is what I was told).

After that it knocked around for a bit and I didn't do much with it.

The following year I read an article about how the new computer-based multitracks were opening up insane backing vocals to everybody and thought I'd give it a try - I added choirs to recordings I'd made of two tracks - Free Time and Sensitive Boy. The article recommended doing up to eight takes of each vocal line, which is what I did. The version of Sensitive Boy still exists, and I'll upload it when I've sorted out the drums, but I've not been able to find the insane choir version of Free Time, not even the mix I did. The only version I had, and which I was able to export from Cubase, had a single lead vocal which I didn't like very much.

So a couple of weeks ago I re-recorded the lead vocal, and did a new backing chorus. Only nine tracks this time (three parts x three), but you get the general idea.

This is a brand new song - I wrote most of the words several weeks ago, but threw almost all of them out last Saturday when I also wrote the chords and the tune. And then I recorded it on Sunday, and mixed it during the week. Consequently there's not much to say about it, really. Most of the references to "you" in the song were originally "me", so perhaps I'm becoming less self-deprecating as I get older, but at the same time more judgemental.

Perhaps I should ask those kids to get off my lawn.

I'm quite glad that most of the chorus appears precisely once, which suggests concision, I hope, rather than not being able to think of enough words.

The guitar solo was fun to, as well. I don't give myself the opportunity to play cheesy guitar solos nearly often enough.

Anyway, the chord progression is almost as eccentric as the lyrics. I'll probably find out what they mean, exactly, in about five years.

This is another one that started as a loop - playing with bits of MIDI and an electric piano sound, and a chunky Sculpture (Logic built-in soft-synth) sound with lots of delays on it (I'm excessively partial to delays). However, once I'd tweaked the piano part, I noticed that it had a melody, and then it grew into half a song. It sat like that for a while, and I hummed along with it. And then I added strings, which seems to be my response to everything these days.

Then one day in a fit of something (possibly being released from several things that had been occupying my time) I took the opportunity to finish the song.

Then I started typing words into TextMate, and (quite a short time later) was surprised to find I'd written a song about a gunfighter, something that's never happened to me before. I mean, I'd never even considered writing such a song, and yet here it was. Ah, the wonders of the unconscious.

Vocals, then. There are backing vocals, but they seem to be lurking in the shadows. Possibly the best place for them.

The sound of the piano and various other cues reminded me of a particular American group of the 70s that I like a great deal, which in turn insisted there be a guitar solo (and, indeed, a punctuative guitar), and then I ran into a snag, to wit: I am not Larry Carlton. I'm not even Walter Becker, and I mean that with no disrespect to Walter Becker.

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.

I wrote this in a fit of bitterness and spite in the throes of the last recession. It comes from a set of songs I recorded in the run up to the sessions for It's Amazing. I suppose I wasn't getting out much, and had come to the conclusion that my recording woes (mostly woes during 1992, recording-wise) could be solved if I:

1. Went for completely stripped-down recording, so acoustic guitar, vocal, drum-machine and bass. The guitar-solo was bounced onto the same track as the acoustic guitar, which seemed like a good idea at the time. That's probably going on my tombstone: "Seemed like a good idea at the time".
2. Sang through my nose (technique to be taken to ridiculous extreme on It's Amazing, but with double-tracking).

Anyway, this would be my Loaded magazine rant, if that publication had existed when I wrote it; perhaps more my anti-Yuppie rant. Rant, anyway, that's for sure.

A curious little song - well, it turned out quite long, but I do think of it as a little song. Evolved by itself on the computer, and am at the moment trying to work out how to play it on guitar (which seems to mean that it comes out completely differently, which is also quite fun).

It came together in the following steps:

1. Noodling around in Logic, came up with an interesting four bar loop.
2. Later on, playing with the loop, made it into a longer loop, with four chords.
3. Began humming to this.
4. Took away several of the original instruments, as they were interfering somewhat.
5. Formed it into the rough shape of a song - effectively ABABABB.
6. Began to get words, which I wrote in TextMate alongside Logic as I was working on the track.
7. Became obvious that final A section was going to be for a solo.
8. Solo section became string part.
9. Recorded vocals and copious harmony vocals.
10. Listened to rough mix of this for a few days, then realised that it would work much better a major third down - from F# to D.
11. Transposed the software instruments.
12. Rerecorded the vocals and harmonies. Thankfully now mostly within my range. Some of the harmonies now a bit low, but what the heck.
13. Played with string sounds to get the one I liked most (very long process, actually, longer than most of the others).
14. Decided I preferred the string sound I first thought of.
15. Mixed, exported to MP3 and uploaded.

In case anyone was wondering how such things come about. I suppose the process is the same for songs that arrive on the guitar, but it's more difficult to separate out the different sections of the development period.

Listening to it again, I remembered a whole bunch of things about it, which sort of got lost in the making procedure - I lost sight of the kind of thing it was as it more and more became itself. Bit of an odd sentence there, sorry. Firstly, there's a synth part in there that sounds a bit like a particular kind of record that I liked in the late 70s - the most well-known example would have been The Ballad of Lucy Jordan by Marianne Faithfull. It's also how I remember a much more obscure record, Frozen Years by The Rumour, which I liked a lot. I used to get these records in packs of five or so for 35p (is that possible? Maybe it was more than that), so I'd get two records I wanted, one I didn't want and two or three I wasn't expecting (adds up to over 100% there, as the precise ratio of wanted / not-wanted records would vary). Anyway, I played the records to death a bit.

I've been going through a bit of a harmony-vocal and strings kick recently. Unusually I worked out the harmonies on paper, which perhaps makes them a bit theoretical.

It's kind of obvious what it's about. There's no specific scenario. Think of your own favourite.

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.

I wrote this song during my first visit to the Edinburgh Festival in 1997. Which is strange, as I quite enjoyed myself.

It is, I have to admit, quite an unhappy song.

I got the idea for the song on the first day I was there - drunk in the general vicinity of the Spiegeltent, which was poised on top of Waverley Station that year; I got the riff in Woodstock Taylor's kitchen that night. I first performed it at Holly Tomás and Peter Michael Rowan's night at On the Mound on the last time I was there. Though not very well.

(The evening was in the cold store in the basement - a a cubic space cut out of the living granite. Extraordinary acoustic, and I suppose virtually all the time it's used to store bags of flour or something.)

This version was recorded through 1999, and was part of the full-instrumentalised version of the songs that went onto Plucked (I didn't do most of them, though there are a few) which were rejected in favour of the stripped-down versions I actually released.

I can't find the original Cubase files, so this is a lightly-tweaked version of the WAV file I mixed down from it all those years ago, which might possibly explain something or other.

The keyboard is my sadly abused Casio CZ5000, which I always seemed to resent for not being another keyboard. In this case I seem to be annoyed at it not being a Hammond organ.

Actually, tell a lie, it was my second visit, in 1998, so I wasn't drunk at all. I was going to go back and change the first couple of paragraphs, but I prefer it this way.

I had the structure of this song - the chords and a vaguely hummed tune - for a long time, and for a long time I knew that it was called My Bumper Book of Lies, or rather I knew that I wanted to call something by that title, and it seemed like a good candidate. But that's how it stayed for, apparantly, forever. There are a few like that, half- or almost-finished. In my mind they resemble abandoned Airfix models of ships of the line.

Anyway.

The words came upon me in January 2008 and I was able to play it at one of my occasional VAC gigs shortly after. I introduced it as a song that I didn't know whether it would work or not, and I genuinely didn't, as it hadn't been played before. But I think it worked.

This recording originally stems from the long chords/title/vaguely-hummed-tune period. Just because I didn't have lyrics didn't mean I couldn't arrange it, and I added bass, percussion and chords that were originally strings but turned into whooshy synth and Hammond organ. Lots of percussion.

After I had written the lyrics I recorded it and added the backing vocals. It was one of the songs that I rerecorded the vocals again with Juan (I got one of the lines of the last verse wrong, so I knew it couldn't be the take. Juan was unimpressed: I say the same thing four times. How could I get it wrong?). Anyway, I rerecorded the vocal a couple of weeks ago, and then in a fit of something-or-other added the mad strings and the whole song changed.

Yes, no mad strings until last Sunday, or perhaps just before that.

I'd had an inkling that perhaps there should be mad strings when I recorded it with Juan - that take was more shouty chanson style than the original version (which had been more like the vocal on Gravity), but was surprised by them when they arrived. In fact I listened through to them and giggled a lot.

I added insistent snare after that, and there's a harpsichord doubling the strings on the bridge and last verse, which seemed to help.

I found that when I turned the strings down in volume I could hear them better.

Anyway, I decided to upload it immediately in case I change my mind and decide I don't like it after all.

This is the twenty-minute ambient loop piece I mentioned when I began posting these things. I think you should be warned about that. I mean, if you think, after five minutes "I might hang on for a bit in case something happens", it might be a good time to give up.

On the other hand, I like it and find it kind of relaxing, so I'm happy to upload it. I was going to leave it for a bit longer, but had to shuffle the release schedule (did I just say "release schedule? Ugh!) a bit.

A friend needed relaxing instrumental music for a project, and I did it to see whether I could do relaxing instrumental music. I'm still not sure.

Next week a proper song, I promise.

I wrote this song immediately after moving to London. What a terrific sense of timing I had. I suppose for the first few months it all looked like urban hell, then downtown SE17 (later SE1), and by the time I came round to making this recording in about 1991, just plain home. Which makes me a bit of a hypocrite, I suppose, as I had no intention at all of going back to a greener place.

I think it holds together quite well - I love the bassline and twangy guitar particularly, and the solo's pretty good. I do have the four-track tapes, but the tape-recorder has given up that ghost (last time I tried to use it, it began playing faster and faster, the pitch perceptually rising, which wasn't much good, really), so this is from a mix that I did just after I got a compressor. So it was a bit over-compressed, though not as much as some things (I suppose the principle was "I've paid all that money for the compressor, I'm going to turn it up until I can hear it do something").

Ends on a sixth chord, by the way, just like the early Beatles. The resemblance ends there, of course.

This is definitely the oldest song of mine that I'm still inclined to perform - about 1987 vintage. Which dates me, rather.

This version, however, was recorded in the SW1 Radio studios on March 4th 2008 - I've been dropping in there occasionally on the Passport show on Wednesday mornings, engineering and recording the live guests Phil has on. On this occasion, the live guest was me, and it gave me an opportunity to try out my new audio interface/mixer combo.

I was so preoccupied with the setting up, etc, that I first of all hadn't thought of repertoire, and second of all forgot to click record on my Macbook (this recording is taken from the live feed of the show).

The drone thing (or loop gimmick, as I believe it's known in the trade), is something I normally do with River Rise, but I tried it with this song at the Jeays Xmas Extravaganza last year, and decided on the spur of the moment to try it again.

When I first did it with River Rise (I stole the idea from David Gilmour), members of the audience looked quizzically at me, and it had some kind of effect. Now, of course, every audience member, man, woman, child or dog, looks on and thinks "Oh, he's got a looper. I hope he doesn't do every song like this, we'll be here for weeks".

Something I'd not thought of was that the percussive element that drops in to the loop is inaudible once I start to get into it, so there are numerous recalibrations while I get back into the groove of it. Also some flubbed words. But then it was live.

First of all let me state that this song doesn't come from my life, my psyche or anything like that. It's the sort of lyric that leads people to adopt a funny expression and hide the sharp objects.

When I was MCing at Bunjies in the late 90s (and based on my further observations in the open mic clubs of London), I came to the conclusion that the fewer chords a song had, the longer it was likely to be. A song with an uncountably large number of chords could be expected to come in at under three minutes; three chords, perhaps four; two chords - at least six. One chord... the sky was the limit. I once saw an MC at the Playpen stop a hippie chick in mid-flow on the grounds that she'd been at it for over ten minutes, and it was someone else's turn. And that was her first song.

Anyway, this is a one-chord song.

(Actually not true: there are other chords in the bridge, which appear again at the end, but not very many, and I like to think of it as a one-chord song. Anyway, it's long, I think we can agree on that).

I used to introduce it as such when I was performing, and only now I realise that it was a lot more interesting for me because I had this arrangement in my head, whereas the audience only had one chord and unnerving vitriol.

The strings I like a lot.

The guitar solo was supposed to be a placeholder - "guitar noises here" - but it's perfect as it is. When I came to do the "proper" solo I realised that there already were exactly the right guitar noises, right there. The solo at the end of Waiting for the End by Cultural Amnesia was recorded under similar conditions. I don't think I could have got it as right if I'd been trying to get it right.

The vocal was one of a batch of vocals recorded by Juan Piola in the Stairwell (the vocal on the version of Unison that I uploaded a few weeks ago was also from that session). He encouraged me to go a little further over the top with the vocals, which I think was a good idea, at least with this song.

[Update: If you downloaded/listened before 9:35 GMT, it was the wrong version, so listen / grab it again. And I fixed the download and podcast links, if they were broken for you. I'm officially an idiot. Have I mentioned that before?]

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.

I found myself making these tiny, inconsequential guitar pieces. Well, two tiny guitar pieces. There may have been more, but I didn't record them.

It seemed like a good idea to call them "bagatelles", although now I realise that it violates the "don't give something a French name unless it's absolutely necessary. Or unless you're actually French" rule.

Actually, that rule could do with a bit of editing.

I'm uploading the second of them first, because I prefer it, really.

This is an incredibly old song. Not as old as The Sea, but close. The bassline was originally made using the difficult-to-use-but-strangely-compelling step-time sequencer that ran on the Yamaha MSX computer (which had a DX9 chip built into it). I would stay up all night writing impenetrable process-based instrumentals using it. Anyway, I found a bassline one day, and programmed it into the computer, then added guitar.

It was one of a batch of songs I recorded over a weekend when I was living in Newport in Gwent, having hired a four-track from Bristol. Very exciting. Very last-century: I paid money to hire a four-track for a weekend, and I thought it was the height of sophistication.

This is a version I recorded ten years later when the future started to appear over the horizon and I was running Cubase on a Mac G3 (which was, for about three weeks the fastest desktop computer in the world, and impressed me deeply, back in 1998). This time I did the bassline in Rebirth (which was a dinky little TB303 and TR808 simulator), although as I had no way of synchronising the two pieces of software I had to export the bassline from Rebirth, import it into Cubase, chop it up and synch the chunks to the tracks. The other synth drums and percussion were a single loop that was similarly chopped up and moved around. It took hours and hours.

We had to make our own entertainment in those days.

And of course looking back from the commanding heights of the twenty-first century it all seems so barbaric.

The original multi-track is lost, and this is a slightly spruced-up version of a mix-down that I found.

Which is all by way of me avoiding the question of exactly what a bewildered art student in South Wales was doing writing a song about a bewildered young man in (presumably) Texas disappearing to Mexico for a few days and then coming back again. I really can't explain it at all. Sorry. I refuse point-blank to take too much responsibility for lyrics that are more than five years old.

I quite like the guitar solos.

I realised a lot later that the song should probably be called When the Music's Gone, because that's what people were referring to it as. Random audience members seem to be much better at titling songs than I am, and recently I've paid more attention to their advice, but by the time I realised that they were right, it was already on a CD and definitely called Little Games, which would work better in Spanish (Juegitos) or Portugese (Joginhos I think, though I could be wrong). It's not, obviously.

This is the version with extra cheese - I particularly like the Farfisa-style organ in the background, which was originally the bassline, before I realised that it wasn't a very good bassline.

I think I recorded it in 1999, possibly early 2000, before I gave up doing the multi-tracked versions of songs and recorded them straight for Plucked

I think I had the riff first. I usually do. And then something of a tune. Just sort of floating around by themselves.

And one day I went to the open mic at the River Bar (nothing especially remarkable in that), and decided to take a very long route home. Perhaps I didn't decide as such - I'm fairly certain that if I'd given it any thought I'd probably not have opted to walk all the way up the New Kent Road rather than straight to Borough - but I found myself there, on the New Kent Road, humming to myself.

And assembling lyrics. Which I'd sing quietly under my breath as I walked, stopping whenever I passed anyone, because I don't want people to think I'm mad, goodness no.

When I got home I wrote the lyrics down.

The next day I found that I'd forgotten the tune, but that it fitted the tune I'd made earlier, with a few tweaks.

As an English person, the song always makes me a bit embarrassed - it's quite feely, I worry I'm going to be arrested for pervery. Perhaps I ought to channel my inner Latin. Assuming I have an inner latin.

And yes, a dreadful steal from T.S. Eliot. Unconscious, sadly, and it's too late to do anything about it now.

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.