There is a stream running through each song on the album...

It is one of Aristotle’s four classical elements: water.

Water is vital for life to exist, it is abundant everywhere and is an incredible force of nature. But more than just an element, I suppose the importance of water to me (apart from the fact that it rains constantly in this country!), and in particular the ocean, stems from spending a lot of my childhood holidays in Cornwall, West Country England (UK). For those of you who don’t know the area, it is probably best known as the ‘boot’ of England located at the farthest-most south-eastern corner of the country facing the Atlantic Ocean.

          I would spend my youth running along Sennen Cove near Land’s End, jumping the waves, bodyboarding and watch- ing the changing tide. I would also spend long hours walking along the coast and cliffs watching the waves crash on the rocks in awe of the sheer force that the heavy winds exerted on the ocean and the landscape. It would often rain heavily and make the ocean even angrier, The rawness of nature in that area of England is impressive and sometimes scary, but it would always have a calming effect on me when I was feeling low as a child.

          Even as a young adult I would sometimes visit my childhood spots and feel nostalgic of a past innocence that I felt I had lost growing up. When I was nineteen, I hitchhiked all the way from the South of France to Cornwall and back just to camp on the beach at Sennen Cove. So with the album Ocean Sky I wanted to somehow use these childhood memories and relate the ebb and flow of water to my emotional journey throughout the creation of the album, using this raw element as a metaphor for various feelings and emotions that inspired me to write.

          A few examples of this can be found in songs like 'Heart In The Sand': ‘Don’t leave me out, now my heart’s in the sand, and the tide pulls your hands’, 'The Mouth Of The Sea': ‘The crashing waves have taken their toll on me’, 'Seafaring Days': ‘Incendiary eyes, locked in the tide, thieves of time soar to the sky’, 'A Rendezvous with Recklessness': ‘Poor the drinks, poor your heart out, rivers flowing down the hall’, or 'Summer Rain': ‘A walk down memory lane in the pouring summer rain”.

       This close relationship culminates in the 13th and last track of the album, called 'Neptune Orbit 1', an instrumental song in which I included the Voyager 2 probe’s audio recordings of the sounds of Neptune. The audio was captured as it flew past the last lonely ice giant of our solar system before drifting off into deep space. In this song I wanted to convey an impression of darkness, immenseness and sheer power of nature whilst giving this freezing oddity a deeply sad and emotional character. I hope you enjoy the small sample of this song attached to this newsletter.

        I long hesitated with the artwork of the album as I wanted it to play an important part in the release. I suppose this stems from the fact that before developing a passion for mu- sic, at the age of around seven to twelve years old I wanted to be an artist. I would draw anything I could see: from natural landscapes and portraits, to fossils and planets (as you may know by now, I have an enduring fascination with space). I would always be obsessed with detail, I needed to produce a drawing that was true to the original, a carbon copy of reality. I would sit for hours in my room after school flipping through books about space or dinosaurs (I remember two books that used to fascinate me: The Planets by David McNab & Walking With Dinosaurs by Tim Haines). I remember collecting fossilised ammonites I had found on the shores of Lyme Regis (UK), I would take them home and spend hours studying and drawing them, forever on a constant mission for something new to inspire me. Around the age of thirteen however, my passion for drawing soon gave way to music, and in particular the drums and the guitar. I’ve never seen it as giving up art for music, but rather the natural evolution of my artistic nature from one field to another, I do however miss my drawing years to this day.

        Despite art holding such an important part in my early life, I wasn’t sure what direction I was going to go with Ocean Sky. I wanted an artwork for each song that conveyed a visual representation of the emotion of the track, and for a while I was actually thinking of picking up the pencil/paintbrush again myself and giving it a shot! However, my good friend Charlie Tupper from New York is a very prolific and talented artist with a very unique style and has hundreds of abstract pieces to his name (see some of his pieces for the album above). I presented him with the idea of producing pieces for the thirteen songs on the album and he agreed straight away. The collaboration has been amazing and each unique piece serves as an artistic representation of the thirteen tracks on the album. The various pieces will be released with the songs on streaming platforms and will feature within the booklet of the CD cover. You will also be able to purchase merchandise with each artwork on it: from t-shirts and hats, to tote bags, mugs and more on a special eShop section I will be setting up shortly on the website so look out for that. 

        I would also encourage all of you to check out Charlie Tupper’s work and give him the attention he deserves here .