Sock Heist Audio

This song came from a bad case of seasonal depression. Every year in Scotland, we hit that point in autumn when the days get shorter and the nights never seem to end. I always find myself feeling more cynical, worried and down. I wrote this track about a particularly bleak year when I felt stuck in life without a clear path forward. It serves as a miserable little baseline for where I was at emotionally when I started getting serious about songwriting.

The poem at the start of the recording ("The City Remembers") was one of the last things I wrote for the album. It's narrated by Lenval Brown—the unforgettable voice behind the narration in the video game Disco Elysium. I've always been a big fan of these little narrative flourishes on albums, and I thought it would be a fun nod to a game whose writing was a massive source of inspiration for some of the more cathartic tracks on the final stretch of the record.

I wrote this song on New Year's Eve 2014. My friends were going out for the bells and, after humming and hawing about it, I made a snap decision to patch them at the last minute. Instead, I stayed at home—played guitar, watched YouTube, and drank a couple cans of beer that I didn’t even bother refrigerating. I got an irritated text message back from one of them and I guess it struck a bit of a nerve. I was awkward. Shy. I had a bad case of social anxiety and didn't feel comfortable in my own skin. I had felt this way for pretty much my whole life up to that point.

Picking Scabs is a reminder to keep trying to do better, even when you're not very good at it. Four months later, I met a woman who would turn out to be the love of my life. Life's funny, that way.

Higher education ain't easy. I've known a lot of bright, gifted people who, for whatever reason, just didn't see it through to the end. A lot of those people—myself included—didn't really plan for any other outcome besides getting a degree and a job in their chosen industry. This song was written as an homage to one such friend.

I'm pleased to say that he's doing pretty well for himself these days, so y'know, don't take the punchline to heart. It's never too late to turn things around—keep at it, you'll figure it out.

Ah, Glasgow Pigeons. This song is a distant descendant of my (mercifully) long-forgotten first attempt at songwriting during my student days. I have a pretty hazy memory of the original melody and lyrics these days, but I assure you—it was a truly terrible song. Still, I've never really been able to get the idea of a song titled Glasgow Pigeons out of my head and this incarnation of the song is where we eventually crash landed.

For the most part, this is just a goofy little piece of comic relief about Glasgow's flying rats—but you could also say it's a celebration of survivors. I really loved living in Glasgow and its inhabitants (avian or otherwise) are some of the warmest, most resilient folks I've ever met.

This is a song about how petty and embarrassing it is to get sucked into arguments on the internet—hence the overblown, aggressive language in this one. It's dumb, regrettable, and more than a little humiliating. I tried to capture this "snapshot" of how it feels moments before you throw the toys out of the pram.

Maybe having past-me mock my present self over a corny country groove will help me stop and consider how stupid I'm about to look. Deep breath, guys.

As a kid, I hated being told by adults that I was wasting my youth. I guess it was easier for me to think of them as bitter and projecting.

I understand now that most of them were probably just trying to motivate an—admittedly—pretty lazy kid. That being said, I still think some of them had forgotten how genuinely petrifying life can feel when you're young. You reach a certain age and suddenly you're expected to know what you want to do with the rest of your life. That's a lot of pressure to put on someone with almost no real-world experience. I really don't blame anyone for wanting to just opt out for a while, consequences be damned.

Youth - hell, life - is finite. For every road travelled, you leave an infinite number of alternatives unexplored. For my part, I've met my fair share of dead ends, compromises, and missed opportunities. I think that's just life, though, right? You'll drive yourself crazy dwelling on every path you didn't take.

Not a very rock and roll thing to admit, but I actually really like my desk job. This song was, in fact, not written as a scathing indictment of corporate culture, but how it feels to be kept at arm's length by someone. One-sided relationships, being someone else's back up plan—all dressed up in a finely tailored suit of corporate clichés.

Human Resources (as a concept) is an easy target; no disrespect intended towards to any of the nice, empathetic people out there just trying to work a 9-5 and catching my strays, ha.

This is the finale to the first half of the record—a moment of navel-gazing on the promise made in Picking Scabs and reflecting on how far I’d come since then. When I wrote this, I'd made a ton of changes in my life and things seemed to be going pretty well. But I still wasn't anywhere near where I really wanted to be. I got a little comfortable being halfway there; I let certain things slip. I wasn't really putting myself out there anymore. I wasn't having a lot of meaningful experiences—just kind of sleepwalking through life. I didn't realise it at the time, but I lost interest in writing music for a while. What's the point in making art when you don't have anything to say?

A month or two later, I'd stumbled blindly back into a bit of real life. I was miserable again—self-pitying—and I found myself reaching for my guitar and a notepad more often.

My guitar has been there for me through some of the worst moments in my life, helping me work through my feelings (yuck) and figure out what's really going on inside. Helping me channel the negativity into something positive—pride, accomplishment, self-esteem. It might not solve everything, but it's a start.

I wrote this song about going through BEP chemotherapy. A year and a bit prior to the events of this song, I'd met the love of my life and moved in with her. Things were going incredibly well; I felt like I'd finally made it in life—that things were only going to get better from here on out. Aaaaand then, I found a lump.

Experience with chemotherapy varies. For me, it was... pretty rough. The summer sun woke me up early every morning, but I was so wracked with anxiety that I struggled to sleep at night. I was in a constant haze, completely overwhelmed with dread, and felt like crap 24/7. Meanwhile—beyond the confines of my one-bedroom flat—it was peak summer. The heat and the long days were doing nothing but making me uncomfortable—while the rest of Glasgow was outside, enjoying beer gardens and barbecues.

When I'm sick, I get reclusive—I just want to be left alone. Meanwhile, my girlfriend—who'd only been living with me for a few months at this point—is having her whole world turned upside down because of what was happening to me. I felt crushed by the weight of that responsibility; if I didn't survive this, I figured I was going to ruin her whole life. And yet, despite everything, she stood by my side. She came with me to every appointment and held my hand through my darkest moments.

Less than a month after I'd made my recovery, I went out and bought an engagement ring.

This is part one of a three-song arc on the record—spanning Galadriel's Mirror, Rictus Grin and Rotorua. Bear with me, because things are about to get pretty bleak for a while.

Out of nowhere, my dad had developed a pretty rare and aggressive cancer that ultimately took his life. It's one of the worst things that ever happened to me. Christ, isn't that an absurdly selfish thing to say?

Seeing him deal with the weight of everything—knowing first-hand what it's like to be in and out of hospitals—just broke my heart. It took all of the colour out of life. Every night I'd go to bed and lie awake, worrying about how he must be feeling.

Grief and anxiety can manifest itself in a number of ways—for me, it was straight-up, physical pain. My muscles ached constantly. This began to trigger my own dormant cancer anxieties, and I became completely convinced that I was going through a recurrence myself. I felt torn between a constant fight-or-flight response and the one rational part of me that felt disgusted that I was making his greatest tragedy about myself. I was stuck in an all-encompassing loop and it swallowed me whole.

A number of tests and some frank conversations with my GP later, I was advised to give anti-anxiety medication a go. This helped immeasurably with the anxiety, but I still had some way to go with processing the grief of losing my dad.

Hello dark comedy, my old friend. Rictus Grin isn't quite about denial, per se. It's about the downplaying of the extent of your hurt—hiding behind a veil of irony. It's telling your friends and loved ones "I'm fine," when what you really mean is, "I understand I'll probably survive this, but right now I feel like there's a black hole in my chest, tugging at my organs. Any second now I will collapse in a heap of loose skin and shattered bones."

For a time there, I genuinely believed that the good times in my life were behind me. That I'd never experience joy in the same way as I had before. How was that even possible when a huge part of my life that had always been there was now permanently out of reach?

Chin up, things start to turn around on the next song, I promise.

So, I'm at something of an all-time low at this point in my life. Eventually, I take some advice from my wife and give grief counselling a go. I'd never done anything like that before—I'd always assumed that I was introspective enough that it wasn't going to be a huge help. I've never been happier to be wrong. In the end, I think it took a lot of the strain out of my relationships. I had a safe place to vent my feelings, reflect on my life and what the loss of my dad meant to me—without further burdening my other family members who were barely coping with this monumental loss themselves.

Things start to turn around a little. Time heals, though the scars remain. With a little perspective behind me, I decide that my wife and I need a win. So I sold a fancy guitar that I didn't need, we emptied out our savings, and we bought two plane tickets to New Zealand to make a long-dreamed-of pilgrimage to the Hobbiton movie set. Yeah, if the two Lord of the Rings references on this record (so far) didn't clue you in yet, my wife and I are big fans of Tolkien and Peter Jackson's movie adaptations.

For a little under two weeks, my wife drove us up and down the North Island of New Zealand. We stayed in Auckland, Rotorua, Wellington, and then back to Rotorua again for a few nights. We were raw, emotional, and still a little bit miserable—but also elated to be in this breathtaking country on the other side of the planet. The mask would slip from time to time, but being there, just the two of us, briefly escaping the weight of the world back home... It was immeasurably cathartic. It felt like reclaiming a lost piece of ourselves. Like gazing into a distant future where things would feel a little less bleak again.

I still miss my dad every day, but he wouldn't want his passing to be a full stop on our own happiness. We're still breathing, and we've got a lot of life left in us yet.

Generally speaking, I don't like to be especially political in my songwriting. It's not that I don't enjoy political music myself or think that it has no place in music—it has more to do with my own limitations. The myriad nuances of my personal ideologies have changed a great deal throughout my life. I guess I just don't feel comfortable preaching my personal understanding of the world when I'm never especially certain that I've got it right myself. With that being said, at this point in an otherwise entirely inward-looking narrative, I felt like I had to reach outside of myself for a moment and talk a little bit about empathy.

The world kinda sucks at the moment, doesn't it? The planet is slowly dying, wealth inequality is at an all-time high and it feels like our communities are getting more fractured and disconnected by the day. What's worse is that there seems to be no shortage of people telling you they know exactly what's behind it all - it's those other guys.

I'm fortunate enough to have come to maturity at an age where the world wide web still felt like a refuge from an indifferent, sometimes hostile world. When I was angry, young and vulnerable to hateful rhetoric, I found a sense of community on the internet. I made friends with kids from different cultures and backgrounds that shared my nerdy interests. I found good-natured mentor figures who understood what I was going through, offering advice and encouragement. I slowly began to realise that there was a place for me in this world. Eventually, I discovered punk music—bands like Propagandhi, Latterman, AJJ and Bomb the Music Industry!—that seemed to understand how I felt; they offered empathy, education and positivity as a means to navigate my anxieties and rejections.

This experience feels like a world away from what the alienated, disenfranchised youth of today are dealing with—a relentless barage of ragebait shoved down their throats by an online ecosystem that directly profits from misdirected anger and resentment. I suppose what I'm getting at here is that while I have little patience for any ideologies that espouse hate or assign blame to different cultures, ethnicities, or sexual orientations—I do still feel a sense of empathy for the individuals who have been indoctrinated into these belief systems. I don't think it's helpful to write people off as fundamentally bad or evil, on either side of the coin.

We've had our empathy slowly chipped away and eroded over the past few decades, and we need to work on getting that part of us back. We need to stop falling for whatever simple "solution" comes out of some billionaire's social media feed. And if it really is too much to ask to extend some basic empathy to your fellow human, maybe consider self-preservation—after all, when the hate well dries up, who are these wealthy influencers and demagogues going to target next?

Never let anybody tell you video game references don't belong in a painfully sincere song about becoming a father. Or lines from a Star Wars TV show, for that matter. Okay, now that's out of the way—let's get into it.

Epitaph is the hopeful resolution to this dumpster dive into my darkest moments, let-downs, and failures. The first seeds of this song were sown as I was walking my dog, not long after finding out that I was going to be a dad. See, only a handful of days prior, I'd caught myself dwelling on the past again. On my fears about the future. On mortality and loss. Yet, when I learned about this kid, none of that seemed to matter to me any more. It reframed how I saw the future; something shifted beneath me, tectonic and irreversible. When the song finally took shape, I knew instantly—after all these years of writing songs—what this album was really about.

Life is going to throw a lot at you, no matter who you are or where you come from. Sometimes, you'll feel like Sisyphus, permanently pushing that boulder up the mountain. It's natural to stress about the future or to look back and romanticise the past. Regardless, we press on. We find reasons to keep on living—however small—and those little nuggets of bliss are what keep us out of our own heads. When you're present, you're not dwelling on past traumas or existential dread. Whether familial, romantic or platonic, nothing keeps you in the moment quite like love.

Life is short, sure—but our memories are often far shorter. A year from now, maybe you'll forget how it felt to make your partner smile today. In a decade, you might not remember that inconsequential thing that made you laugh at the dinner table. Let's be honest, you're definitely gonna forget how good that simple weeknight meal you made tonight tasted. There is magic in the mundane. Stay vigilant—too many moments of genuine happiness simply dissolve in memory, while we cling to our trauma with an iron grip.

For a long time, I thought that feeling things so intensely was a weakness. It crippled me in moments that demanded action. It made me fragile. All of that remains true—but it's what gives this whole experience meaning. That fragility, those familliar anxieties that crippled me—they helped me to connect with people, to form meaningful relationships, to create music and to process every astonishing little sensation in this brief window of history that I have the privilege to exist within. If what I'm saying here—or, indeed, the record itself—resonates with you at all, then I hope you're able to find some catharsis of your own. I hope that you, too, are glad to be you—an incredibly sensitive instrument.

I suppose that's the epitaph, then: you won't last forever. But while you lived, you felt deeply — and that mattered.

Sunrise, Parabellum is about my wife. She's the emotional centre of the back half of this record and has consistently been one of the true bright spots of my existence. We've been through a lot together, and we'll go through a hell of a lot more before our lives are over.

"Sunrise, Parabellum" is yet another Disco Elysium reference. It's a play on the Latin expression si vis pacem, para bellum meaning "if you want peace, prepare for war". It's one of many lines in that fantastic game that stuck with me long after I completed it. No matter how well things are going, life always seems to find a way to make itself a battle—but there's no one I'd rather be in a foxhole with than that woman.

This song wasn't originally going to be on this record—it was written a good while after everything else and didn't fit neatly into the track listing without undermining the tone or themes of the narrative. I considered saving it for a follow-up EP, but this thing took me a long time to make and this song felt too important to risk never getting around to recording it. In the end, I compromised with a stripped-back acoustic version that made it on as a hidden track on the CD/LP release. I still like the idea of doing a full-band version if I ever get around to that follow-up EP, but for now I guess you could think of it as an epilogue of sorts.