I Am Legend (2025)
So, roughly 7 months after the release of "Footprints In The Sand" - which I was, and remain, immensely proud of - recording has now finished for my new album!
Interesting title and please don't think it's an ego trip, it's not... I thought I'd do something like I did with the sleeve notes for Long Earth "The Source". Here's a wee glimpse into the mindset behind each track. To start with, this is a real value album clocking in at over an hour of split new material. It's also a really cohesive rock album with nothing under 120 beats per minute! Quite gothic too in places, hence the concept I came up with for the album cover.
Track Notes
Time Slips
I thought it would be fun to do something a bit off the wall - pun intended - so I recorded the clock which hangs in my hall. The same clock that hung in my Granny & Grandad's house. Being an antique clockwork clock, perfect 120 beats per minute as the basis of this song. Lyrically, a bit of a fantasy turn on the fact that time does indeed slip away too fast.
Black Mirror
Tricky one this as the lyric goes back to when Fiona left. The concept is again slightly fantasy, Snow White-ish, "How long til the mirror went black"?
Windows
Windows is a bit of a social commentary. Perverts have looked through windows for years and years, now they can do it with webcams, social media and Windows operating systems.
Hidden In Plain Sight
Through Fiona, Nicola and I had been friends for decades so, when we got together it was almost like she was Hidden In Plain Sight.
Invisible
I originally wrote the demos for Invisible a year or two before forming Long Earth - and a version appeared on "The Source". Rather than simply redoing the original version, I rewrote the lyrics. Invisible is now about the invisible people in every city, silent, lost in their own thoughts and turmoil, sometimes sleeping in doorways or under cardboard - condemned to be the invisible people through circumstances they didn't choose.
Too Old To Know Better
Yes, I probably am.... A fictional snapshot of life on the road with a working, gigging band. Slight lyrical change as one line was "Check the girl with the great tits" but I changed it to legs so that I wouldn't have to mark any tracks as Explicit for release.
I Am Legend
Now the explanation... This stems from a conversation I had with Kelly at the dentists in mid 2024 and then, the same night, a deep conversation with Nic. The subject was being abandoned from your marriage or relationship, the abject destruction it causes psychologically and in every other way but how you rebuild to become a different and hopefully better & stronger version of yourself. I came up with the chorus lyric on the drive home from Alloa to Dunblane.
Welcome To The Freakshow
Actually the last lyric / song to be written for the album (because I couldn't have an odd number of tracks). I love the melodramatic atmospherics of Victoriana, travelling circus, freak shows. So this is a real nod in that direction but I made it a little more current and social commentary as elements of society are very quick to judge people in society who choose to express themselves in their own way through make up, piercings, tattoos and whatever. We're all human underneath...
Mr Boots
Mr Boots is a kind of homage to the spirit who dwells in the Edinburgh vaults. Nobody knows who Mr Boots / The Watcher actually was in life, other than he's malevolent, so I made him a murderer! It's a tweak of his nose, I'm not scared, come and get me motherfucker!
For You And The Moonlight
This is a pure, unadulterated love song - about and for nobody in particular. In fact it's pure fictional narrative. I imagined a bloke walking the streets of a city at night to get to his girlfriend's. For the warmth of her embrace & passion. It also works quite nicely in the context of "is she one of Mr Boots' victims?".
Dig Up The Graves
Dig Up The Graves started as a kind of Burke & Hare graverobber type theme - but then I put a spin on it. It's actually a longing, lost love song - he digs up the graves, excavates the past, trying to find the heart of his lost love. With a shovel! Hehehe...
Goodbye (Til We Meet Again)
This I wrote as my funeral song! When Mum was dying I wanted to record a cover of Dust In The Wind by Kansas but ran out of time. So, basically, looking at my own mortality, I wanted to record a song which would let my kids hear my voice and have the words which I genuinely feel for them and the ones I love, present, past and future. Christie & Scott are my sole reason for living, I love them more than life itself and am so proud of everything about each of them!
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