Here I am just before I attempted to record the first vocals for the new album.

I can’t shake this bloody cold. My Christmas break was pretty much wiped out by a cold and almost a month later it still hasn’t gone away.

This is not how I wanted to start vocal recording for my new album. Ideally for recording vocals you want to be as mucus free as you can be.

Is that too much information?

Running down the back of my throat it was. All snotty and unpleasant.

Too much information?

I was wheezing and leaking, so I was.

Nevertheless, I did get some good stuff recorded. In particular, I think I’ve got the lead vocals done to the studio version of ‘Wizards of this Town,’ as well as all the vocals to the album’s longest song and the third instalment of what I’m thinking of as my ‘tentacle trilogy’.

What’s that? I hear you say.

Well, on my second album I had The Beast of the Air, a song about hunting be-tentacled sky-kraken. I followed that two albums later with ‘Some of the Creatures have Broken the Locks on the Door to Lab 558’, a song about tentacled creatures er, escaping a lab.

This album also has an even number so it seemed the natural place for a third song about tentacles. In the first and second the monsters were the enemy. Will that be the case in the third song?

No. No, it won’t.

So the current state of play is this:

There are eleven songs. For those that have a traditional rock band set up, basic tracking of guitar, bass and drums is done. The remaining two will be recorded over the next month, as will the rest of the vocals.

What’s it like? Weirdly, despite none of the songs being autobiographical, this is my most personal album. At its heart this is an indie rock album, but with all the other things I like thrown in: prog, folk, a bit of metal, electroacoustic music, and a bit of classical.

I’ll share more over the coming weeks.

Do you want to hear an extract of the work so far? 

If you were a subscriber to my Immoral Supporters group on bandcamp, you could. Click here to find out more.