The last couple of albums I’ve made have been mostly acoustic home-made affairs: mostly me recording at home with a guitar and ukulele, some melodica, and vocals. This album has come about from me from me experimenting with writing songs on the ukulele and in unconventional tunings on the guitar.

I wrote the words for “Autumn Leaves” a few years ago and about a year later found they fitted the mood of a song I wrote in Open G tuning. I don’t write many love songs because I don’t think I’m much good at it but my singing on this is pretty good at conveying the emotions of the song. Another open-tuning based composition is “The Days Draw In…” which was originally recorded last year but was finished up about a month ago.

My first song written on the ukulele, “To Get Away From it All”, came out on the last album, “Interesting Times”. In the same vein as that dreamy instrumental, and
also featuring melodicas and voices, is “You’re Never Alone With the Stars At Night”. “Walk A Long Time” is a more sprightly uke-based number, while “When We Were Two” is a sad, contemplative song.

“Paper Airplanes Soaring in the Sunshine” features singing but no discernible lyrics, since I sang mostly gibberish to begin with and then reversed many parts of the vocal track as an experiment. It has a sort of haunting melody but who knows what it’s about?

“Talk About the Weather” dates back nine years, and this recording’s been in development for a few years. Some things take a while to finish. So did “Shimmer On”. Based on a bass riff I came up with at a friend’s house, it took a while to develop into a track and then into a song. This also features some bass and electric-guitar playing by my friend and frequent collaborator Shane Watt.