Buckle up

02 - I GRATED MY THUMB

This is one of the tracks on the album that’s mainly me, or at least me on Logic instruments with the addition of bass guitar by Dan Hawkins. It’s a fairly literal account of a lunch prep injury that happened on a bright September day in 2023. I remember the sun streaming through the kitchen window and lighting up the big blobs of blood accumulating on the granite worktop following my zesting injury and I thought, ‘I think I can get a jingle out of this. Maybe even a song’.

04 - PIZZA TIME

I recorded the demo for this in early 2022. My son Nat was 18 at the time and was supposedly revising for his A Levels at home but as far as I could tell he mainly wore a bathrobe, ate pizza and watched the Sopranos. Whenever we’d nag him about revising he’d say “It’s going to be OK, trust me”. In fact he ended up doing better than we feared, and Pizza Time was partly about reminding myself to get off his case a bit in his indolent months/years. After all, I had been exactly the same at his age.

And after his age.

In I Love You, Byeee, I wrote about how Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood responded when I sent him the demo.

05 - DANCING IN THE MIDDLE

06 - STANDING STILL

Not much to this one. Joe did the beats and some of the synths towards the end. I provided the lyrical angst. It’s a fever dream about entropy written in the grip of grief madness, obviously.

07 - SPIDERS

An instrumental I made one September for all the spiders that live in my nutty room and the sadness I feel when I walk through their threads and get a webby beard.

08 - TEA TOWEL

A sort of tribute to João Gilberto. Joe Mount played all the instruments on this one. I did the squeaky plate percussion.

09 - SHORTS

10 - SKIP THIS TRACK

11 - FALLING TO PART

Another ‘getting old’ song/jingle. Pete Robertson played most of the guitars on this.

When I interviewed the actor Paddy Considine on my podcast, we talked about his favourite band, Ohio alt-rockers Guided By Voices. It made me go back and immerse myself in their music in all its endlessly inventive, home-made oddness. Because a lot of GBV songs are little more than home demos, I thought it would probably be quite easy to make my own reasonably authentic-sounding Guided By Voices song. So I picked up the guitar, selected a scratchy effect in Logic and slid up and down the fretboard while I tried to do an impression of lead singer Robert Pollard. Turns out it's not so easy.

The fan at the end is the one in our bedroom at home. I like sleeping with a soothing noise at night. I imagine I'm in an airship above the clouds as the sun sets. The sides of the cabin are open, and I'm sitting with Sarah and the children as the warm wind blows over us and the engines roar. The sound of a fan is also handy for covering the sound of snoring and farts.

01 - INTRO

I thought I’d play the middle class micro-problems card early on, hence the mention of ‘Waitrose’ in first line. Joe Mount had the idea to create a mini overture to start the album and knocked up the music on one of the little synthesisers he has scattered around his garden studio out in Kent where we worked on the album in six or seven sessions lasting two or three days each, every few months from September 2021 to April 2024.

03 - DOING IT WRONG

File under ‘Social Media Songs’. In 2018, a producer called Emily Knight got in touch to ask if I would present a show for Radio 4 about alternate ways of living our lives. Her original title for the show was We're Doing It Wrong, but someone at Radio 4 changed it to the more judgemental You're Doing It Wrong. I warmed to the phrase when I thought of it as a parody of the prevailing tone of the internet, where I'm regularly informed that everything I thought I knew about the world is bollocks.

A lot of my musical efforts begin as attempts to imitate other artists. This one was an attempt at making something that sounded like a track on Remain in Light by Talking Heads.