A year ago today, my debut solo album ‘Between a Disillusion and Resolution’ was released.

Before this, I had released my music as the progressive rock group Eden Shadow and decided to release music under my own name.

The whole process felt liberating and the nine tracks on the album features many facets of my musical personality included some progressive rock and metal elements, but I also steered towards a songwriting focus with songs such as ‘Grey Day’, ‘Kaleidoscope’ and ‘Anything is Possible’.

I wrote a lot of these songs whilst I was teaching music in Dubai and thematically the album was an exploration of transience and personal evolution. The music is eclectic and probably the most personal I have released and I thoroughly enjoyed the process of writing and recording it with my team of fellow musicians and artists.

The album is available digitally and when live shows can happen, I will be going through the process of having physical copies available, the links are below.

In the meantime, I am working on my next solo material and go into the studio next month.

I look forward to sharing more musical creations with you in the not too distant future.

When I write music and have a basis for a solo, I get really excited. This is an opportunity to take my musicianship further and express myself on the guitar in a way where I push my limits.

Once you have the chords and know what scales you need to use, there’s then the possibilities and choices you can make to unfold a narrative.

You can use a variety of techniques, dynamics, and pitch to build tension and really take the track to a new height.

Very rarely do I achieve this in the first take. I don’t even achieve it in the next ten either. It takes exploration and trial and error and eventually you find yourself in a flow state where the magic starts to happen. That may be a hundred takes later.

Don’t give up before you get there.

I’m working on a piece where I know the beginning and I know the ending.

What has been the real challenge is deciding what happens in between.

The beginning establishes the melodic motif and information, there’s a development of ideas, particularly rhythmic, and the ending starts with a return of the precious melodic material in much more dramatic fashion with a flurry of interplay between the instruments. I’m digging it but the gap in the middle has eluded me for weeks.

I’m getting there now, and from carefully chopping away at it, I’ve managed to find what works, I’m suggesting where I’m going without giving the full game away, especially from a tonal and harmony point of view.

It’s an abstract process but eventually by chipping away at it, you find a creative solution, one that bridges the piece together and allows it to establish the sense of direction.

Humans are not very good at it.

The agricultural and industrial revolutions have made us exceptionally good at utilising the Earth’s resources and improving lives for many of us, but it’s come at a cost.

And whilst I’m no expert or a virologist, I’m confident in saying that this pandemic is a cause of us taking our exploitation of resources too far, in particular the way we treat animals.

I greatly admire the innovations that have happened and developments of technology in the sustainable world of energy, but whilst there are many amazing people working in this field, there are those who are still working with resources that will benefit a minority in the short term whilst harming many of us in the long term.

We should not wait for disasters to bring out the best of us as that might be too late.

The choices we make today are essential in how we determine the course for the next century and the generations to come.

The fields that people choose to work in, the choices we make, the pressure we put on people in positions of power to live and work with the long term in mind is essential.

When I think of my outgoings, it comes down to access and an on demand culture.

I pay subscriptions for on demand, music, media and music software that I use day in, day out.

I’ve never paid to digitally own music unless it has come with a physical copy.

So with this distinction of what I pay for and what’s worth my money, I honestly find it to some extent baffling as to how NFTs have become a thing. Non fungible tokens. The idea of digital ownership is a bit crazy to me, because it is the equivalent of owning nothing, even if it is presented as ‘scarce’ or exclusive.

The idea of paying vast amounts for collecting something has always been a thing, from baseball and pokeman cards to canvases of famous paintings.

However, what is rather infuriating about NFTs is that they are not even a tangible product but use an enormous amount of electricity. What a waste.

There has been an inevitable rat race and hustler’s cycle between creators and buyers who are trying to get rich quick but the likelihood of most NFTs having any value at all is next to nothing. Maybe that’ll change in future but for now, it appears to have been a fad that went as quick as it came.

In a world where there is so much information and artists are trying to figure out how to sustain themselves in a digital world, it’s worth evaluating the way to which we value that which we create, but I am no way near convinced that NFTs and the underlying idea of scarcity is the right answer moving forward, especially where ecological sustainability is concerned.

If you are a creator, you are better off not spending any energy on trying to create or promote this kind of thing as you will be less a creator for it.