More than 10 years later … 2017 came around. In the grand scheme of things and compared to many other people who are way less fortunate, it really wasn’t that bad, but relative to my life it was a tough year. The recurring theme was needing to overcome a constant run of sagas all year long; health problems, car accident related issues, some uncertainty and changes with our jobs. We also lost our favourite pet, a rabbit we’d had for nearly 8 years from a baby, we got her the year we got married and she had a lot of character. I realised through her passing that in a way, I was lucky, because I’d got to this age without ever really having to experience any grief. By the way, I know what you might be thinking … it’s just a pet … but she was a big deal to us. We also had 2 other pets get very sick, it was just one of those years, for once I was actually looking forward to New Years Eve! I also found myself craving a creative outlet which I couldn’t find in other areas of my life, my work is not creative it’s more about being good with numbers/words, influencing people and being organised. I was drifting and pretty unhappy. 

I started to watch motivational videos online etc. I was watching Wolf of Wallstreet a lot, such a funny movie, and I started watching Jordan Belfort real life videos on YouTube which were kind of interesting. One day I found myself sitting at my old Korg synth, learning songs I liked by Radiohead or Bowie, or more recently stuff by Adele. I started to learn about Garageband, and did some rough recordings. I was moaning that I was a terrible singer and wished I was better and Melissa as usual was the voice of reason “why don’t you get some lessons?”. Honestly, my thought process with singing was, you get the voice you’re given, you get the range you get lumbered with at puberty, tough #@*($. But I started getting lessons and watching YouTube and I’m getting a bit better, I’d say I’m about 60% happy with my singing so long way to go. 

All of this built a bit of momentum though, and I quickly realised doing covers just wasn’t that motivating for me, I wanted to create something new, so I started writing and recording in parallel. In the previous band I wrote 5 songs, 2 we used and were OK, 3 were terrible and scrapped. That means these songs I’m now writing are the 6th song onwards that I’ve ever written, so I’m hoping to learn a lot quickly in terms of the writing and the singing. I did think about keeping these tracks to myself, but I guess I was curious to see if anyone might actually like them. I figured I should try to share it, I’m a pretty isolated guy aside from my wife and very close family, so maybe it will do me some good to open up a bit to a wider audience.