All about the new song

My new single, One of Those Guys, was released last week. You can hear (and buy it) here.The initial writing, a bit like Lost But I Can't Care, happened while I was in between teaching guitar lessons at a school. I didn't have my guitar with me so I was playing on one of those tiny cheap nylon string acoustics that schools seem to find so attractive. I've not written many three chord songs so this was an attempt at one of those, trying to get a melody that moves without needing a strong/unusual/fluid chord sequence underneath it. Later on I added the Bridge bit that does more harmonic moving around.

It was recorded at the home studio of Matty Pinfield, it was good fun to work with Matty again and everything went really smoothly. Here's a couple of pictures of us pretending to look busy;

Matty Recording Drums

Recording Vocals

Recording Vocals

Mixing Desk

Recording Guitar

The cover art image is of me and my childhood friend Andrew. Andrew's grandparents lived opposite me and every weekend Andrew and his brother would stay with them. In the picture we are standing on the grandparent's front lawn, Andrew is wearing the Batman cape that my mum made for me and my trousers feature The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I particularly like the white Metro behind us, as growing up in the 90s seemed to involved a lot of sitting in/looking at/talking about Metros.

About a year ago while visiting my parents I went round to the shops with mum. On the way back we bumped into Andrew's grandmother making her way slowly home. When we reached her house she asked me to wait there as she had something for me, which turned out to be this photograph. It seemed completely random that she would have this photograph for me as we hadn't seen each other for years. Very sadly this was the last time I saw her as she passed away shortly after. At her funeral I learnt stuff about her and her husband that I had never heard before, particularly how caring and generous they were to friends and family. I was quite touched by this turn of events and remembered that I was actually a bit scared of her when I was a child because she seemed to be pretty strict. Looking back twenty odd years later it was obvious that Andrew's grandparents had in fact been incredibly generous opening up their home every week not just to their grandchildren but the boy from over the road with the strange but interesting dress sense. They fed and looked after us and allowed us to build a very ambitious but ultimately unsafe tree house in their garden.

The image seemed to fit the feel of the track, so I used it.