This is an album consisting of 8 songs, recorded (and partly written) in the month of May, in 2022. It was recorded and submitted to Lights and Lines as a contribution to their Album Writing Club competition.

I named it "Personal" because every song on it is personal to me in some way. There are songs about specific times, people, places; feelings and emotions of those times and places and people, etc… in my own life.

The first 3 songs are around 12-13 years old. I never really got round to recording Music Man back when I wrote it, and there was a recording of The Smiles On Our Faces, although that doesn't seem to be in existence any more. I did, however, make an acoustic/vocal demo of the song Lost Words, in the studio at the college I attended at the time, and which I've included as a bonus track on the album.

The next 3 tracks were written in the last few years, while making my previous album, so again, although these were already written, I had to relearn them, and make some tweaks to the lyrics etc. before recording them for this specific project. I've included demo versions of It's All My Fault and One More Year
as bonus tracks, and a video file of the first demo of Web Of Lies, as a bonus item.

The last 2 tracks were both written during the making of the album.
IDK is something I had an electric guitar part (arpeggio thing) already recorded in a different project, so I built the other instruments on/around that part, and wrote the lyrics too. I’d Give You It All is something I definitely wouldn’t have written if it weren’t for taking part in the Album Writing Club comp! It’s an odd little song, just ukulele and vocals, both of which were first take recordings, so I don’t believe you can get any fresher from the source than that, really!

It was a very rewarding, enjoyable experience, taking part in the Album Writing Club comp; while also being somewhat stressful and all-consuming mentally!
I tried to give an honest account of myself and my music, using a lot of my old household instruments (bongos, tambourine, harmonica(!!)*, and I actually bought a cheap recorder which features mainly on Web Of Lies, but also in the Lost Words intro, and a cheap ukulele which I borrowed from my dad, and I wrote IGYIA on that.)

*The harmonica gave me some issues!

I also gave myself certain time constraints with recording sessions, for example; the acoustic guitars for the first 6 songs were recorded in 1 session, and what I had after that session was what I’d use. If I had 2-3 takes of something I’d choose the best one and go with it. This has been good for me, as usually I’m tempted to redo and redo in the aim of perfection, but sometimes you can lose the feeling of the song by doing that.

I’ve also pushed myself to do things like record piano, which I don’t really play very well, but I managed to come up with simple enough parts that I could play and get reasonable takes of…

Mixing it all has been interesting too. I recorded everything in the same project, with the idea that it’d help bring the thing together as a whole album, rather than just different songs thrown together. So lead vocals, or rhythm guitar etc for every song were on 1 track for the whole project. Effects like reverb and delay are universal to the project, so every song has the same basic effects on it (although there is a bit of tweaking with automation etc. between songs, so they’re not all exactly the same!), and I think that has worked quite well. Of course, if there was more time, each song could probably do with a bit fine tuning with regards to the individual mixes, I’m pretty happy with the results of this particular experiment, and will likely do the same for future album/EP projects.

Thank you to the folks at Lights and Lines for organising it all, and allowing me to take part!

You can find Lights and Lines, and the artists on their roster, music they've released etc. on Bandcamp here:
lightsandlines.bandcamp.com