Lucid Dreams 

The first and main riff for this song was written several months before as a short 20 second snippet of music. I had a nightmare to do with my friend who had recently taken his own life, and when I woke up I wrote the lyrics down about how I felt. The next day I felt they deserved some music with them, something I don’t normally do, and I stuck those lyrics to that riff. The disco section is the same riff sped up, but it was inspired by the song Sweet Disposition by Temper Trap. It goes through an almost musical reflection on loss really, from being hurt by this loss to feeling that you can never be forgiven and that it should have been yourself.

Why would you question it?

Around this same time I wasn’t particularly happy with myself. I drove to do some shopping, and at a red light I just started singing the verse melody to myself. Instantly, I kept singing it and when I got back to my flat, I sat down at my keyboard and blocked out a few chords.

One lyric in particular I like is: “death is like taking your suit off”. I saw a George Harrison interview where he said that, some time before he died, and it stuck with me. The solo and indeed the whole song was also quite inspired by George Michael’s Jesus to a Child.

The Asylum

This song has a less depressing genesis: it began as one of my usual guitar songs. I’d been listening to Metallica’s Welcome Home (Sanitarium) and I decided to write some lyrics about a mental asylum around the song. My writing partner helped substantially with the lyrics and I also wanted to finally get my hard rock inspirations into my creation. The inspiration for the end of the chorus came from God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols.

7/8

When I started writing music and collaborating with my friend Tom, he sent me a number of instrumentals he had been working on for years that he didn’t know how to finish. This one in particular was of course in 7/8, and the lyrics are all about one’s fear of being unsuccessful at the thing that they love the most. It’s definitely the most ‘out of the ordinary’ piece of music that I’ve made so far, and I think its one of my favourites for that exact reason.