This album has been a long time coming, 12 years in fact. The last time I was crazy enough to brave red light fever to record my own compositions was in 2008. With a little help from my friends, I recorded my debut solo fingerstyle guitar album 2 Head City. Since then, I’ve written another dozen tunes or so and they’ve been burning a hole in my pocket like unspent cash. In mid-2018, my friend of 25 plus years, Dave Sanders, came and did some fill in gigs with me in a different project and I started talking to him about helping me with this album. I already knew that his regular bass-playing partner in crime, Thierry Fossemalle, was the man for the job so Dave asked him to get on board and lucky for me he accepted. We discussed making a start in early 2019 but there were too many things in the way for all of us, so we didn’t actually get a rehearsal in until Xmas! The rehearsals were a process of trawling through about 25 tunes and shaping them for the trio setting. Dave and Thierry contributed some great structural ideas and together we massaged the songs into the form they have today. I can’t thank them enough for their patience and expertise. All this amid the stop start nature of Covid restrictions that 2020 has brought us. Narrowed down to a baker’s dozen, the 13 tunes on this album are a mix of old and new. It has been fantastic to hear the new tunes come to life with a band, and to realise new versions of some tunes from 2 Head City. It has been an exercise in perseverance and patience but for my money, worth waiting for. I’m already planning the next one and hopefully it’ll be more like 12 months than 12 years.