Behind the scenes
In January 2023 I joined Århus Sangskriverværksted (ÅSV) and participated in a five day winter retreat, strongly focused on songwriting, along with about thirty other participants. After more than a decade had passed since my last attempt at writing my own stuff on any scale, my friend Gunnar Snær Gunnarsson convinced me to join the community and give it a go. It took a few days for me to get going at the retreat, but then I managed to write and co-write some interesting songs, a few of which ended up on this album.

The rest of the songs on here were written during February Album Writing Month (fawm.org), an online community where songwriters are encouraged to write an album’s worth of material during the twenty-eight days of February.

I have always been a fan of odd time signatures, but I haven’t really explored them much myself before now. On this album I’ve experiemented with how crazy I could make it sound rhythmically while still preserving the strong melodies in the songs.

Lyrically the album plays around with science fiction themes like space flight and time travel while also exploring more down-to-earth material such as cats up to no good in the garden, relationships and inner strength.

In the digital booklet you might notice an image associated with each song. The images look a little off-putting, and that’s because they are all generated with the use of AI in a text-promt-to-image app called Night Café. I like the way the images are almost perfect, but there are inconsistencies in almost all of them. We live in interesting times. Soon the AI will improve to the point where we can’t tell the difference.

Musicians
Everything is performed by me, except the guitar theme on Brick By Brick and solo on The World Is My Playground which is performed by Gunnar Snær Gunnarsson and backing vocals on The Ballad of Tír na nÓg by Ellie Mackey.

The recording process was fairly simple and standard: Drums first, then bass, then layers upon layers of guitars, keyboards, clarinet and vocals along with a broad selection of percussion instruments. If less is more, imagine what more could be!

Thanks
It’s been quite a ride. When I joined Århus Sangskriverværksted in January I didn’t expect to have a finished album by the end of March. I didn’t really expect to get anything done at all, but here we are.

I would like to thank everyone who has backed me up during the process. People at ÅSV have been extremely helpful and welcoming. If you are an aspiring songwriter, I really recommend joining.

Most of all though, I’d like to thank you for picking up this album and giving it a listen. It means the world to me.

Thank you.