Last Friday I had a chat with Mike Cairns, who played drums on my upcoming album. We were recording a little interview ahead of the podcast I intend to inflict on you to accompany the album release.

We had a chat about how he approached recording his drum parts, getting out of music teaching, and we also touched on escapism, the main theme of the album.

As you can see, we both had a great time.

And what does that mean? It means the new album will soon be out!

Last week I signed off the final masters, so the music is finally finished. Mastering – ie. getting all the different tracks to sit together in terms of loudness and so on – has once again been done by David Elliott/Elephant, the Evil Record Label Boss.

This inevitably means that I have now heard all the songs far, far too many times and am slightly sick of them. That’s how the album process works. The point at which you finally get to hear them is the point at which I really don’t need to hear them any more.

Over the next few weeks I’ll share more things as they get sorted – artwork, release date, how you can get a copy, all that sort of stuff. There’ll even be a single with a video to accompany it.

What does the album sound like?

This one’s the most rocky yet, with guitars at least as loud as on Happy People if not more so. There’s a bit of metal, a lot of rock, and quite a lot of prog. How much prog? Well, the first song is 12 minutes long and the last track is 20 minutes long. So quite a lot of prog.

As I said, the theme is escapism. The idea was to have a load of songs that were just fun, up tempo stuff about spaceships and stuff. And that’s pretty much what I came up with.

I am very much looking forward to everyone else being able to hear it.