I’ve been debating about how much to write about the ideas on this album because I never want to tell people what to do or think, the lyrics and process of making the record were a natural response to events and possibly my own mental state, and thats not always particularly interesting to me when I see an artist banging on about that kind of thing. But in the end I think it’s probably best to be as honest as possible and try and at least give a flavour of what it’s all referring to. So I hope it adds something to the whole listening experience for some of you reading.

I got evicted from my house while we were recoding the album. The house we have lived in and used as a studio since 2006. The thoughts that go through your head are things like “I really should have knuckled down after college and worked a job that paid and bought a house, I have let everyone down because of my selfish pursuit of fame and glory” and other such bizarre mental gymnastics.

It is especially traumatic when you have kids/dependents. Without going into too much of a “woe is me” tale, We have always lived on very little so that we can make music and even with part time work in other fields we don’t pursue money, so when something like this happens you can’t just say, oh well we’ll just rent another house and live there.

The reality was that I needed to be in a very different position to continue living near my kids schools or playing music or doing any of those things that were important to me and my family. I was pretty freaked out by it. Basically we were officially at risk of homelessness, although there were plenty of people who would have helped us out.

It also was a lot about my identity as the cool bohemian musician who lived in the middle of the countryside with chickens and rope swings making crazy music in the annex of his tumbledown house. I was cool as hell and now that was all going.

I knew at the time that thoughts like this were all bullshit, but a lot of people face things like this, and much worse things too and the way we measure success and failure in this society, it is hard not to spiral into the black pit of doom.

The reality is that the worry and the anxiety and the depression etc is fueled by your own interpretation of events – the fear of the unknown – and the way out is not necessarily changing the course of events, which is how we often se the solution: Ie you just have to knuckle down and solve the problem and then you’ll be happy again.

Of course there are things you need to do in a situation like that, but really the key to it is changing your mind about how you interpret events because if you train your mind to think the worst, well you will at least be miserable if not actually make the worst happen. So I decided to work on not being afraid of it.

I eventually knew in my heart that things were going to be OK (It’s not that simple but in the interests of not going on too much lets just say that I 100% worked it all out). And of course these kinds of incident are a hotbed for creative output. A lot of the album lyrics are inspired by dealing with the madness of your own thoughts and maybe even a look at how to give up the addiction to negative bias and doom thinking.

So the words “evict us from the Ugly House’ are a kind of “bring it on”, which was a really helpful thing to write at the time. I also felt like the Ugly house is a really good metaphor for the “ego” (whatever that really means) – I guess it’s kind of the belief in personal identity: Hello I’m Henry, I am a musician, a father, a liberal, a really fun guy, I am super cool. I don’t like liver but I love the movies of Wes Anderson – or some shit like that. It’s a limited and, yes, ugly place to live because it isn’t really there, it’s just a concept and it changes and there has to be more to life than that.

But, and it’s a big “but” – I am not into preaching anything apart from maybe some faith in the good stuff. And words are notoriously leading so all the lyrics can be taken with a pinch of salt – they are not, I repeat not, an attempt to convince anyone of anything, they are a play of ideas and pictures and an experiment in making what you might call “art out of real life” or something. 

So with that said I will end this mini essay and let you go about your day. I hope it brings you some cheer.

Henry x