So first, here it is, the thing I was talking about yesterday:

But I feel I should say something more about it than “here it is”. Perhaps where it came from, how it came to be. And as usual where to start that story is hard to pin down.

In terms of writing the words, the first bit that I wrote was about 12 years ago when I wrote a limerick on a napkin in the Pret at Hyde Park Corner, shortly after the end of a sweet but doomed-by-long-distance relationship. And it’s still there as the first verse of “Keeping My Pictures of You”

Then it grew because at the time it was becoming a thing, in certain corners of the internet, for people to be sending intimate photographs of themselves to each other, because they could. And it seemed like there might be some fun in thinking about how that might play out in a light-hearted way (before the concept of revenge porn came and ruined some people’s lives) – the perils associated with the persistence of digital media.

The other three were all written in 2015/16 – Blockchain Blues after I went to some technical seminar on how Bitcoin works, which is why it has references to “merkle trees” that most people won’t understand. Enemy Within came days after the election of the 45th President of the USA. It was slightly different then, more repetitive (using “choose not to” over and over again) and was more inspired by the shock that someone could say all the things he’d said and still get elected. And at the same time, we were seeing the Brexit vote here and the same sorts of people involved. Finally The Ballad of Ned’s Head came about as part of a fundraiser songwriting challenge for some good cause or other. I think the prompt was simply a picture of a guy called Ned and it seemed like the quickest thing to do would be a nonsense song based around things that rhyme with Ned.

I had them all as demos with me singing to ukulele, as is my way. Ned’s Head and Blockchain Blues are a 12-bar and 16-bar blues respectively. Enemy Within is set to something like the traditional tune “Red River Valley” and Keeping My Pictures just came out like that, I don’t have enough music theory or history to know what it is. I just knew it was a waltz – are limericks particularly suitable to a 3/4 setting? I don’t know.

And then over the years I’ve performed them all live, which helped to refine the lyrics based on audience reactions – always much less outrage than I anticipate and oddly, more laughs than expected, so you work up the laughter – this particularly applied to performing Ned’s Head to see what kinds of picture you can paint and how the character of the storyteller emerged.

I’d never done any proper home-recording. I’ve been in proper recording studios with proper engineers doing things with tape, because I’m old, but never really got the hang of stuff like Garageband.

Then in October, I had Covid and had time to watch “Get Back” and seeing them in the studio sparked something in me. People always say that the Beatles were successful because they were ordinary and just like us and it reminded me too of the beginning of Mark Lewisohn’s book where he goes through their family trees and it struck me that not only were they “just like us”, their whole families were just like mine – the same characters, the same stories and so I was watching “Get Back” with them practicing and recording and evolving the material, with much less technology than I’ve got on my desktop and I thought “perhaps I could have a go at making something a bit more polished of the songs I’ve got” – Y’know, if they could do it…

So the short version is that I then downloaded Reaper (it’s great!) and found an online course in how to use it to record your own things at home and did that. Spent a couple of weeks coming out of Covid recording a version of Sweet Georgia Brown and once I’d done that, I set myself the 30-day challenge of making something every day with the four songs that are here. That’s all.

So do have a listen, you can stream for free (though I think there’s some limit, I can’t remember what) and if you like it, chuck us a fiver.