Coming soon: Only Human – The Lockdown EP.

This has been a while coming!

Recorded way back in the covid lockdown, this a delightful collection of 7 songs from that time, 6 of which also benefit from the lovely harmonies of my sister, Linda Griffith.

2020 was a strange one. Covid had forced us all indoors and our local open mic night, along with every other social gathering, wasn’t able to meet in person and so we all went online to try to keep those social interactions alive.

I’ve often said that perhaps the only good thing to come out of covid was that it accelerated people’s willingness to learn online skills and partially reduced the so-called “digital divide” for a lot of people.

So our weekly sessions continued online, with a live webcast every Thursday night in place of the real event, hosted by the wonderful Chris and Jayne of www.ruthinallstyles.co.uk.

All the contributors would submit their home recorded videos, which were presented via live-stream, hosted by Chris and Jayne, often in fancy dress! They put so much energy into it, and it was a real highlight of the week during those dark days. Those old streams are still on Chris’s YouTube channel.

In preparation for those weekly shows, I began recording some of my own songs (and some covers too). I wasn’t live streaming on Twitch at that time but had a half decent set up to record myself reasonably well, so I’d generally do a few takes and pick the best one, then send the audio to my sister. For the first few, Linda recorded herself on her phone standing in her wardrobe, which provided some eq challenges later when mixing, but for some of the later recordings she had access to a decent microphone which produced a much cleaner signal.

Why wait 5 years to release these songs?

Originally I’d intended to put them out straight away but I dabbled with the idea of adding more tracks to make it an album, of adding more instrumentation to fill out the tracks a little. None of that ever happened. Then there was the self doubt and perfectionism getting in the way – were they good enough anyway?

My wife has always been my biggest supporter. And she’s usually behind any good decisions I’ve made.

How my Twitch audience inspired me too.

Since I joined Twitch, I’ve been playing at least once a week since October 2021 and slowly building an audience. I feel lucky to have a core group of regular supporters (and incredible mods too) who show up stream after stream. They’ve been influential in terms of gaining the confidence to put this out. I’ve lost count of the times that someone in chat will ask where they can hear more, or if I’m on Spotify etc. My usual response is that I don’t like Spotify…

But it all got me thinking. I had those old lockdown recordings, which were already there and sounded good. If I just put them out, it might help generate the motivation I need to record all the other songs I’ve written since. And thus a positive feedback loop will have been kickstarted!

And the process of revisiting them and remixing them has only confirmed my feeling that these are recordings worth sharing. They’re a snapshot in time and considering they are basically just live recordings (complete takes, no selective overdubbing) they’re nice performances that I feel proud of.

So, what’s coming?

1. Remixed and mastered versions of 7 of my original songs.
2. CD release.
3. Download versions
4. Maybe later – streaming versions (if I can get over my instinctive revulsion towards Scamify).

The artwork features an adaptation of a block print by my wife Catherine, with some photography by my son Michael. It was important for me to reflect my family life in this work, and this was a lovely way to achieve that.

Pre-order and get your name on the artwork as a supporter

Call me old school, but I still love Cd’s. It’s so nice to have a real physical product in your hands.

I still regularly buy cd’s from artists I want to support, simply because I want to support them and buying a cd puts way more money in their pocket than Scamify.

Pre-order here

There is a minimum price but you can also add your own price, if you wanted to support my music to an even greater extent.

Either way, thank you so much!