Our first full week of writing in Nashville.

I’m really excited about these songs, especially one called ‘Alien’.

We wrote ‘Alien’ about how it’s sometimes felt for me growing up on a small island.

I didn’t always feel a lot of support from family members towards my love for music and dream for it to become a career. People would often immediately ask what my plan B was, before even seeming excited about plan A. It’s hard not to feel that, but still I chose to go against the tide and attempt my dream of becoming an artist.

For years I would return home unsuccessful on that mission, only to more doubtful faces and awkward family dinner questions.

“How’s music going Archie?” each time like their patience is running out.

No matter how exciting I found opportunities at the time, they were never quite met with the same level of optimism.

I couldn’t help but feel like people were upset with me for leaving the Island in search of something big with people in my family even asking “Do you think you’re better than us?” once I was able to do music full time. I was working off of a minimum wage salary but doing the career I’d worked years for. I was on cloud nine!

‘Alien’ opens up with myself lying on the beach, looking up at the sky as I would as a teenager, questioning why I was depressed, feeling misunderstood and different from everyone else I knew that were working hard on grades to get into University.

The chorus explodes into these lyrics

“They told me not to head for the bridge out of town,

Said, don’t you want to stay here with us? Slowly drown.

I ran until my feet couldn’t touch the floor no more,

Now they call me Alien, call me Alien”

I think it’s easy to feel alienated within society. All you need to be is a little bit different in some way and people take a step away from you.

‘Alien’ is for every one that’s felt that way.

I’m sure you’re all hoping to hear a little more about how Nashville is?

It’s as you’d expect really! A lot of cowboy boots, amazing musicians on every corner and the city lives on music. It’s very inspiring!

We’ve not yet had the chance to explore too much as we have a lot to get done in a short time but I’ll attach a little video in the exclusive content of where I’ve been spending 90% of my time!

One thing that was fun this past week was meeting up with a good friend, Kai. I met Kai on The Fray tour last year whilst he was playing keys for the band and sleeping in one of the nearby bunks on the tour bus. He was one of many people on that tour that really supported me through a tough time. My anxiety was more in control of my body than ever and these people showed me so much love. We hung out and wrote music, had coffee, laughed a lot and he showed us his new studio he’s building in his back yard. It looks like it’s going to be an amazing place to create one day soon!

More to say next week I’m sure! Until then it is..

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8 weeks of writing this journal! I didn’t ever see myself as someone who would take up journaling but here I am, two months in. Thank you to anyone that’s reading these posts. The community is small but that makes it even more special that you’re coming back each week.

Just as a recap, I came up with the concept ‘10 Weeks Ago’ when someone suggested I start writing these journals for Substack, sharing the stories from the journey we started in April!

At the time it was exactly 10 weeks since we left. It felt like both a great way to remind myself of the past couple of months in a portioned out kinda way and also would allow me to retain some privacy within my life. I know it’s the way that a lot of artists share daily updates but I am a little too private and introverted for that. I like to process the week that I’ve had before I tell it to everyone else.

Anyway, this week brings us to somewhere new… Nashville.

We arrive in Nashville and the moment that we step off the plane it feels like we’ve landed in The Amazon. The combination of sweat from the heat and moisture in the air from the humidity has already soaked my t-shirt. We load our lives into the Uber taking us from the airport to our Air BnB and begin talking to the driver, about the heat obviously.. He tells us that “the weather this week is actually pretty mild” whilst looking very fresh. I have only been to Nashville once before, following my Free US Tour in 2025 where I travelled across the states playing free acoustic shows in several cities.

It went - Toronto, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Chicago.

I then flew from Chicago to write with some local writer/ producers for a week before returning to Los Angeles for more writing. I must say, I didn’t see an awful lot of Nashville the first time around. I was there alone and most days just returned to my air bnb studio apartment after the session and watched TV, wrote more music.

This time around I am here for 3 weeks and with Josefine so hopefully we can see some more of the city together.

The concept of these 3 EP’s means that I need to avoid writing anything until I am in that city, so that moment I touch down feels almost freeing and exciting creatively. It’s been 6 months since I really put time into writing last and I couldn’t be more excited to see what Nashville brings and how it ends up. I’m going to drop a playlist in the exclusive content section of this journal which includes a collection of songs I’ve been listening to at this time.

(skipping forward to the end of the week)

We began writing yesterday and it’s fair to say that this is a sound you’ve not heard from me before, but strangely it feels just like me. The song we wrote is called ‘Broken By Design’ and was written about finding someone who loves you for all your flaws, insecurities, imperfections. Typically, things you have no control over. The song is inspired by my insecurity about my ticks and how I’ve remembered feeling shocked when Josefine doesn’t mind them when they come on. I’m really excited to venture further into this sound and see where we end up in 3 weeks time!

I’m excited to share more about what we’ve created next week! But until then, have a good one and thank you again for reading.

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Our final week in Los Angeles!

Wow, that’s come around so quick. Looking back, I’ve had so much fun in certain moments but then have sadly felt very stressed in others. I don’t know how or why but coming into this journey of packing up our apartment and travelling I thought it might be non-stop fun and the best time of our lives! Maybe one day I’ll look back at it as that way, but right now it definitely hasn’t been that. I don’t want to sound ungrateful and taint the trip, as I say, it’s been very special in moments, but it’s such an unbelievable amount of work. 8 songs to fully produce, social media content to film, music videos to plan, live sessions to shoot and we absolutely have to get it done this month otherwise the whole campaign could suffer. A lot of pressure..

The plan was music in the first 3 weeks, music videos in the final week. So that’s where we are at! About to film/ direct/ edit our first ever music video, and it’s pretty ambitious. The two songs we are filming videos for this week are ‘Alaska’ which is the first single release and then a song called ‘2003’ which will be released later in the year.

For the ‘Alaska’ music video we would really like to loosely follow the story of Christopher McCandless A.K.A Alexander Supertramp. In 1990, Christopher set off on the journey of a lifetime, a journey to Alaska! He gave his full college fund to charity and drove his car as far as he could until he eventually abandoned it in a flash flood. He hitchhiked across America, kayaked across the border into Mexico and then eventually made his way back up and into Los Angeles. Whilst in Los Angeles he worked a job and tried to save up some money for his eventual journey up to Alaska, some trip! Seeing as this EP is fully inspired by my time in Los Angeles it felt fitting to start the music video from that point in the story and follow a characters journey from the city into the wilderness.

Our friend Dean Binfet agreed to play Christopher’s character and did an amazing job! We spent a day filming all of the narrative parts of the video and then a few days later filmed the performance aspect on a rooftop in downtown LA. The two band members in the videos are Adam Ackerman and Eric Caruso F.K.A Blonde & Brunette. I have produced this full project with Adam and Eric so it felt really special to have them involved in some way.

Josefine and I spent days researching how to achieve the shots we could visualise in our minds and then created a full shot list so we didn’t miss anything. Something I’ve learnt from being on music video shoots in the past. Josefine had been learning how to edit/ grade and piece together the videos so we’re as ready as we can be I think.

I’ll attach a link below to the video so you can check it out if you like :)

Sitting down to write this chapter of the ‘10 Weeks Ago’ I wasn’t sure what I would be writing about again. Today it fell out of my mind in 30 minutes, which is nice. I like to have an overall theme to each chapter and after reading this one back now I think the theme of this week is to pursue your passion! Whether it’s to travel more, to make music, to film music videos, to go to more concerts etc. Just do what you can to do that!

When I went to college at 16 I selected to study Law, Psychology, Sociology and Business Studios as I was told that music is not “A real job”… excuse my language but F*ck That!

I ended up missing most of my college lessons due to overworking at a care home on the island and on top of that struggling with depression and anxiety every day. After my first year, I failed most of my exams and the college said I should keep studying Business as I was doing well in that and then pick 2 new subjects to go alongside it. I picked history and film studies. My thought being, I love films and creative visual arts. Before you ask why not music? At this point it wasn’t possible to start a music course and well.. “music isn’t a real job” remember?

6 months into year two of college my depression and anxiety had become far worse. My attendance was at around 30% and every time I attended college I had members of staff trying to track me down to ask what’s going on. I was somewhere I didn’t want to be and in life there is not much worse than that. Sometimes it’s hard, it’s tricky to get out of that. Maybe you’re in a job you hate but need to provide for a family or want to move away but worry for missing your family. Most of the time though.. it can be possible.

And so here I am 12 years later wrapping up, in my opinion, 8 of the best songs I’ve ever written. One thing I don’t fail at these days is attendance, I work every day of my life, because I love what I do. Not every day, but most. The final thing I’ll say this week is that after many years of exploring what was once told to me.. I can confirm… music is in fact, a real job.

See you next week, I hope!

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Week 3 here in Los Angeles working on my next musical project.

A concept EP which is the first of three planned projects that will entail travelling from Los Angeles to Nashville to Stockholm to write and produce a project in each city! The hope is that each collection of songs will have a different feel, being inspired by the feeling of the city I am in. I’m really taking this seriously, not writing any music for St. Lundi in between these cities.

This week we are working on multiple songs but one in particular that I’m excited to talk about is ‘Chase Your Heart’.

‘Chase Your Heart’ was a song that I was inspired to write upon receiving a phone call from someone close to me, letting me know they had split from their partner. When I asked if they want to be with them still, the answer was “Yes, of course I do”. So my response was “Go get her back then! Tell them you’re ready to put everything into making it work”.

When I find inspiration for a song it’s rare that I involve all of the small details when writing the song, for a couple of reasons. The first being that I like to keep the song open and accessible to everyone that hears it, so that they can be hear their own stories within.

The other reason is that I don’t feel like it’s okay to share everything about someone else’s life in one of my songs, especially without permission.

In my first album ‘The Island’, the whole concept of the album was my life, relationships with my family and the Island I grew up on, therefore, I shared a lot, and I mean a lot! I’m finding at this point in my life as an artist that I am enjoying writing stories that are inspired by real life events. I still feel all of that emotion when I am performing the song, but I can write the story freely and that’s quite exciting. To not be bound by the exact truth, names, places etc.

‘Chase Your Heart’ follows the story of someone who doesn’t express how they truly, romantically feel towards another and then begin to witness their chance at love slipping away.

The first line is “Outside the corner store, you wear your hair down more, new guy standing by your side” - The gut wrenching feeling of seeing the person you like with someone else.

“Did I miss the chance? Been trying to understand if I can ever make it right” - The desire to try and fix things but the fear of it being too late.

“When I broke your heart it broke mine a little, but the cracks got deep and tore down the middle, there’s waterfalls from tears I’ve never cried” - I love this line a lot. It’s confessing to the mistake and how much the mistake has affected the main character. As time has gone on, the crack in their heart has started to tear down the middle leaving their heart broken in two. The waterfalls from unshed tears showing someone that tries to hide emotion and not be vulnerable.

As the chorus opens up they allow themselves to be vulnerable, explaining all the things they miss about the other person and that they’re going to fight to win them back. It gives the story some hope.

My favourite line from the song is “I saw a book in the trash, called ‘How To Get Her Back’, couldn’t help but take it as a sign”. I would never use the word trash usually! I guess that’s the LA influence coming through. But I love how delusional, desperate, hopeful the main character has become. Seeing things as signs. I guess that’s something I can relate to myself In a way. I’m a huge sucker for a sign. Often for me it comes in the form of some lucky numbers I’ve had since I was a child. They pop up from time to time when It feels like I need them the most.

Much like the other songs on this project, this song feels like a time capsule into the years where I began to love music, bands, songwriters. There’s a nostalgia to the early 2000’s for me because that’s when I was a child discovering a lot of things for the first time. Things like music that would go on to become a huge part of my life!

As the song closes out I get to live my lifelong dream of rocking out with an electric guitar! Like I used to with songs like ‘Yellow’, ‘Fix You’, and ‘Iris’ when I was a child. Switching the air guitar back then for a real one now!

‘Chase Your Heart’ is OUT NOW! Go give it a listen on a platform of your choice and I’ll see you back here next week.

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This week we’ve recorded live drums for every song and even recorded a live session for one of the songs! Although we are working on 8 songs, we’re only meant to be producing 7, but for the first time in my life I genuinely can’t choose which one to let go. 

The song titles are Alaska, Butterfly, Chase Your Heart, Dopamine, Heaven Sent, One Year On, Wasted Love and 2003. 

There was one moment in particular this week that really stuck with me. I was doing vocal warm-ups  in Nat and Dean’s studio which is the room next to Adam and Eric’s, where we are recording everything. You might recognise Nat’s name (Natalie Sawicki) from some of my song credits - Mercury, Alaska, and soon to come Dopamine, One Year On, Butterfly. I have not yet had the privilege of writing music with Dean as he splits his time between music and acting, however, you may recognise him from playing the lead role in the ‘Alaska’ Music video!

I often head into their room to warm up my vocal when they aren't there. There’s a huge window I tend to stare out of whilst warming up to keep myself entertained and this time I found myself becoming intrigued at something happening over the road. 

A woman stood next to a white people carrier car as if she was waiting for someone and then walking in that direction about 20 metres down the road an older woman who I recognise from this area. She seems to struggle with mental health and potentially addiction much like a lot of people in Los Angeles that have been failed by the system. I watch on, in the corner of my eye as I see the older woman begin to talk with the younger one which further sparked my interest. A long way off and behind a thick glass window, I obviously wasn’t able to hear the conversation but was confused by the way they were communicating. It looked as if they were arguing. The younger woman takes something from her pocket and places it on the ground just upon the pavement and in response the older woman turns around and starts walking away, in the street but just next to the curb as she usually does, visibly talking to herself. 

For a moment I wondered - Am I witnessing a drug deal? Is this woman some kind of modern day Heisenberg? 

The older woman returns, picks up the item from the floor and walks away. The younger woman, looking rather defeated by the altercation, returns to her car and drives away. 

5 minutes later, I am finishing off my vocal warm ups when I see the older woman walking along my side of the street, she pulls out the item. Fully invested in being nosey at this point, I lean over to see what it is. She takes off a lid and starts squeezing onto her arm. It looks like some kind of ointment for her sores. It hits me… Did she know that person earlier on bringing her medicine? Could it have been her daughter?

I all of a sudden feel overwhelmed by sadness. I have witnessed someone close to me struggle with mental health and addiction and couldn’t help but imagine the two of us in a similar situation. There is a crushing realness in the way it must feel to know someone you love is living on the streets and struggling in that kind of way, a huge sense of helplessness.

Each week I sit here, put on an album and stare at my laptop until the journal I will be writing falls on to my lap. My plan is for each journal to be released on Monday as I find it to be fitting with the name St. Lundi. This week I failed to achieve that so apologise to you all. It’s a great opportunity however to thank any of you that are reading these journals. I feel like I’m learning things about myself as I’m sharing them and the whole process has been very helpful and therapeutic for me.

I aim to provide exclusive content each week for paying subscribers. A small £4.50 fee for what is turning out to be quite a lot of great pieces of content! This week I’m going to attach that content here for free and instead leave some links below to charities that help with homelessness, addiction and mental health incase anyone feels like donating.

I’ll see you guys on Monday next week!

All the best

Archie

Charities

https://www.crisis.org.uk/get-involved/donate

https://www.mind.org.uk/donate/

https://cafdonate.cafonline.org/393#!/DonationDetails%23/DonationDetails

This Friday my new single ‘Chase Your Heart’ will be released! Here is a snippet of a live session we filmed :)

Here we are.. I can’t quite believe it, but it’s the last week of my 30’s.

I’ve always been one to say things like - “I’m not scared of turning 30” and “age is just a number” but I think that I started saying these things less and less once 29 arrived and there was only a matter of days left of my twenties.

It’s weird… writing this now, I have been 30 for 10 weeks and it’s something I only recognise about myself upon talking about it. I guess that’s what our parents and grandparents are always on about with still feeling like they’re in their younger selves.

In the past 6-9 months my outlook on life has started to change a little. The things I would find myself prioritising before and pushing myself to the furthest edge for, now seem unnecessary in some cases. I wouldn’t change much about the last 6 years of my life, which to be clear, have been the years since I was able to go full time in music, but I do think if there’s one thing I would change, it’s the lack of ‘taking in the moment’.

I personally believe that part of living out your dream requires sacrifice and in my case I think that’s come in the form of never feeling like anything is enough. 1 Million streams, 10 Million streams, 100 Million streams. I am now on my way to approaching half a billion streams and I genuinely don’t know where that feeling will end, unless I change.

So…

I’m going to tell you all about something that I’ve kept pretty under wraps now because it’s a part of this story that if I chose to leave out, would be defeating the point of this entire journal.

In November last year I experienced the unbelievable privilege of going on tour with one of my all time favourite bands whilst they toured one of the albums that got me into music at the age of 9/10 years old for its 20th Anniversary!

I’ve been on somewhere between 12-15 European tours in the last 4 years, and this was the first where I went alone, without a friend or band mate to keep me company, after being offered the opportunity to sleep on the only remaining empty bed on the tour bus with the band which I obviously could not turn down! To tour with a band you love is one thing but to spend 3 weeks living on a bus with them around Europe is kind of hard to comprehend, even still.

Well, this tour was both the best and worst time of my life.

It seems I’d finally reached a point where my body said “Nope.”

Ever since I was a child I have struggled with mental health and the way it can affect my body. I grew up with OCD and suffered from ticks which I’m now learning are basically Tourettes. Did I swear involuntarily? No. Did I throw my hands out uncontrollably? No. But I did and still do suffer with involuntary ticks that even writing about right now are becoming triggered. It’s something I am finally learning about myself, along with the OCD I still suffer with and the overwhelming anxiety that I believe is the source of it all and the depression that follows it all. I have been in and out of periods of therapy in the last few years that have undoubtedly changed my life for the better but what I am now learning is you can fix the problem, but did you really fix THE problem? And is the problem even a problem? Or is the problem the way you view the problem? Complex right?

Anyway, I’m rambling.

My anxiety started presenting differently on this tour and although most days I felt great socially, my body was suffering. There were shows where I was walking onto stage, alone, with pains in my chest and dizziness that made me nearly lose balance on stage on several occasions. It might sound dramatic but I went to sleep some nights wondering if I would wake up in a hospital and although I fortunately never woke up that way, I did eventually end up in a hospital on the tour. The doctors told me they were worried for my heart after seeing my blood pressure reading at 160/110 and told me I need to stop working and reduce my

stress.

I missed two shows.. but that’s not really me. It never has been. So I got back for the final 4 shows of the tour in London, Belfast and Dublin but then when I got home, it really all hit me. Things need to change.

It’s easy for me to look back and feel like I was unlucky to have experienced all of that on a tour with my favourite band, but really? Wow, I was so incredibly lucky.

I do not know what I would have done without everyone on that tour. The same group of people that wrote songs which were there for me and helped me heal as a young child were also there for me, in person, later in life when I needed someone the most. That sentence is something I will never quite understand but is something I have lived and whilst we are on the topic of life and turning 30, life is something I want to live. I want to be healthy, I want to be happy and I want to be the artist that I’ve dreamt of being since I was a child.

So, here I am in Los Angeles six months later, beginning the production of 8 songs that I love with all of my heart. First up? A song written about the struggles of mental health titled ‘Dopamine’. Obviously.

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I’ve started this Substack to form a community around my music. Each week the articles will be written for free and I’ll be offering exclusive content for paid subscribers with the goal of building a community that helps me to realise my next projects. Subscription is £4.50 a month. This weeks exclusive content includes a section of the demo for ‘Dopamine’, a link to an empty folder where I will be dropping a stripped back cover of ‘You Found Me’ on Friday 31st July.

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Touchdown California..

We’ve been in Los Angeles for a few days now and I wish I could say it’s felt as magical as the last times, but it’s been different. The city still holds every ounce of excitement as before but this time I was handed a different cup to drink from it seems.

Upon arrival after a 16 hour travel day from door to airport security, the human being wearing a uniform checked my “Alien with an Extraordinary Ability O1 Visa” which I’ve had for 2 years now and they didn’t like it. Maybe they didn’t like me.

They called for “the guys out back” to come take a look. I was taken into a very dull room where I was told not to use my phone and must wait to be spoken to. I’ve heard many horror stories of people getting to security in the U.S and being sent back on the next available flight for one reason or another so at this point my mind is all over the place… and i’ve not even done anything wrong!

After 20 minutes of biting my nails I was seen by a different human being wearing the same uniform. They seemed confused why I needed to be questioned and confirmed my visa was all in check, typed some things into their computer for 10 minutes whilst I stayed quiet like a naughty child in a principals office and then handed my passport back to me saying “Have a good one” with a smile on their face…. What a trip! And the trip hasn’t even begun yet.

We leave the airport feeling relieved, pick up our hire car as usual and start driving to our accommodation in Venice, just off of one of our favourite streets in the World, Abbot Kinney.

We arrive and all is great.

We spent the first day going for long walks, eating Mexican food at one of my favourite restaurants and drinking a lot of coffee! Whatever we can to stay awake after going back in time 8 hours.

An incredibly busy month ahead of us, it’s hard to feel as relaxed as we normally do but I think we’re doing a good job of trying to take all of this in!

We wake up on the second morning, bright and breezy.

“Let’s go get some groceries for the week”

Out we head to our beautifully peaceful residential street, palm trees watching over us.

“What the f…..”

Our car has been completely and utterly wrecked in the night. What is happening right now.

This trip feels cursed right now.

We spent a lot of the day on the street talking with a lot of passers by that seemed to have information on what happened. We were told it happened at around 11pm and the driver was speeding recklessly down the quiet residential street when they slammed into our car. They immediately took off scraping other cars on the way out. How does that even happen?!

After a long and stressful day of phone calls with the hire company and LAPD, our car gets towed and replaced with a new one as if nothing happened. We must pick ourselves up and keep moving!

I feel like across my life I go through purple patches and… not so purple patches. I try to remind myself that after so long of being dragged through the mud you’ll see the sun rising somewhere and although sometimes it feels like the World is fighting against you, it most definitely isn’t.

The phone rings… it’s Adam. We’re going to meet him at the studio and then he’ll take us to one of our favourite spots Emmy Squared in Santa Monica with a big group of our friends that we’ve not seen for 6 months, eat pizza, drink beer, laugh.

What would we do without these people? I actually don’t know.

Before 2 weeks ago I’d never written a journal before and writing this week’s journal has felt a little less thrilling than the last but I do feel like it’s helping me process things which I didn’t expect. As someone that has suffered with mental health illnesses ever since I can remember, I highly recommend writing a journal. Even if it’s just for you :)

Oh… and if you’re reading this, live in Los Angeles and hit & run a black GMC Terrain down Crestmoore Place on the night of 1st April, fuck you.

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I’ve started this Substack to form a community around my music. Each week the articles will be written for free and I’ll be offering exclusive content for paid subscribers with the goal of building a community that helps me to realise my next projects. Subscription is £4.50 a month. This weeks exclusive content includes unseen vlog footage of “the car day” and some fun times with friends! and… the title of my next single :)

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10 weeks ago this journey began.

We packed our lives into a small yellow storage unit and took a 12 hour flight to Los Angeles, California.

The plan? Three EP’s (it means extended play) written within three of the most musical cities in the world. Los Angeles, Stockholm, Nashville.

Let’s jump back to where this all began…

12th August 2024, my first trip to Los Angeles!

I had a week full of writing sessions, promotional meetings and a showcase performance on one of Grant Owens “We Found New Music’ nights at Bar Lubitsch, West Hollywood.

I wasn’t sure how I would feel about LA. I had heard only stories of large populations of homeless people and extortionate uber rides. From the moment I took my first steps out from my Air Bnb into the wild, I felt this huge sense of belonging that I had not felt since I moved to London as a 21 year old singer songwriter with a big dream. The feeling both humbled me and excited me at the same time.

After a week of great songwriting sessions with many amazing accredited writer/producers, I had a day in with a producer duo titled Blonde & Brunette (Adam & Eric), recently graduated from Stargate’s LA based music school LAAMP, along with their fellow graduate, Natalie Sawicki and an up and coming artist named, Mercer Henderson. We spent the day writing a beautiful duet which was once set to see the world. Right now it’s hard to say if that’ll ever happen.

I felt this instant sense of home in a new city when working with Adam, Eric and Nat. They were like family with each other which made me feel very at ease and almost like I’d found “my people” across the pond. From that day on, I kept in touch with them and when I returned the following February in the midst of my first U.S tour I managed to fit an evening in with Adam, Eric, Nat and another fellow LAAMP graduate, Valerie (VIBI).

We all spent the evening in their Santa Monica based studio writing a song together and simply enjoying each other’s company, laughing, sharing stories. A song called ‘Butterfly’ was born.

I returned to LA after my tour ended, playing shows in Portland, Seattle and Chicago in the interim.

This time I was joined by my life partner and co-writer, Josefine. I had been telling her about the guys for so long and was so excited for her to witness the amazing community of people I’d been able to call friends so far from home. We continued to write and enjoy many nights with this huge community of fellow musicians that were all so close knit with each other. It was 2 of the best weeks of my life. In that time we had the beginnings of a song with the working title ‘Soundcheck’ as it was a guitar riff I would play in all of my soundchecks. On our final night we wrote a song called ‘Mercury’.

‘Mercury’ was released in August, becoming one of my most successful releases of my career and ‘Soundcheck’? Well.. we returned 7 months later to write for a month and it is now known as ‘Alaska’.

To cut a month into one paragraph..

Eric came into the studio one morning and said “I really think we should try this early 2000’s piano rock sound for your project”. It was immediately “Yes”. Everywhere I’d been going prior I had both seen and felt traces of the early 2000’s. All individual signs, almost conditioning my answer at this moment. Much like the slight adjustment of a tectonic plate, this simple suggestion had such a huge ripple effect. A dam was opened and through it flooded 28 songs in a month. Today that 28 songs stands at 8 that we are now packing our lives up to go and finish with the guys in LA before heading to Nashville and Stockholm to continue this journey into those cities, all inspired from the story above.

I would say that I don’t know what this journey will hold, but as you may know from reading the first three words of this journal, the journey began 10 weeks ago.

Same place, next week?

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I’ve started this Substack to form a community around my music. Each week the articles will be written for free and I’ll be offering exclusive content for paid subscribers with the goal of building a community that helps me to realise my next projects. Subscription is £4.50 a month.

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