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Latest Developments on Planet KOAS

/ stevehunt18 / Leave a comment

Well, it has been a short while since the last update, or should I say, flurry of updates which occurred in August. Its now halfway through October and things have moved on…. and are still moving on.

The most important one is that the day job is no more. No more real life to get in the way. I have, with effect from August this year, on reaching the grand old wizened age of 60, retired from the IT profession that I had inhabited since my mid to late 20’s. Never say never again that I wont go back into it or some other job at some point in the next 18 to 24 months or so, but as it stands at the moment; there isnt an impetus to do that and there isnt an intention to either and I dont expect to re-appraise that much before Spring next year.

So, I can return to a place where I was about 14 years ago, where it was possible to devote my time to my creative passions without having to share the time with a job and even better, without having to commute. This is obviously a big step and one that has been pretty much 42 years in the making and I hope I can make the most of the years in front of me to be as productive as I can be.

The next most relevant matter is that the house move has been completed and the studio room has been mostly set up (I say mostly, because the room has most of the hardware that will be required to run the studio and most of it is in place, but there is still quite a bit more of “trying to squeeze a quart into a pint pot” where there is additional instrumentation or other relics of the old studio that still need to live somewhere and as I hinted at last time, the new room is significantly smaller). Ergonomically, things are better and the new Glorious Studio Compact desk is almost a third of the size of its predecessor, which is going to take some getting used to. I am going to seriously try to have better organised cabling than the old room as well, but that is going to be a game of jenga that is barely starting at the moment. Some of the existing cable sets will be adequate, but others, I sense, are likely to be a nightmare and certain items of hardware that I use as part of the regular workflow are maybe not quite going to be so easy to hand as they used to be.

Never mind, its something that is underway as I speak. I’m hoping to have all of the legacy hardware stuff dealt with by the end of next week, mainly the migration of 14 years worth of data from an old iMac and a Mac Pro 5,1 which has served me very well for the last 4 years to a Mac Studio M1 Ultra. There are more recent iterations of the Studio available, but after a lot of research, the M1 Ultra because of its high core count was deemed to be the most suitable option and the one that delivers best bang for buck.

As it stands at the moment, the biggest boat anchor on the migration process isnt believe it or not, the transfer of data (some of the disks will just be taken out of one array and placed in another and all the software programs will need to be re-downloaded and installed anyway (now that is going to consume some serious bandwidth))… its the deletion of the legacy data from the old 5,1 system.

As I look at the screen now, there is something like 3.7million files currently deleted and a whole s-pile more to follow. And until those are completed I cannot dismount the disks and add them to their new array. It will be good for productivity when I can clear this old equipment out of the way and sell it on so that others may get to use it as successfully as I have managed to. The 5,1 still works and while I’m typing now, it is flying along, but when you start shovelling some serious coal on it and expecting it to deal with modern plugins which are ever more demanding, it starts to creak and groan and even though its incredibly adaptable and updateable and is built like the IT equivalent of the old BMW E39 5-series – massively, massively overengineered for its time – I dont think anyone at Apple seriously thought these things would still be going nearly 20 years later. Given how throwaway the PC universe is, nearly 20 years out of a Mac Pro is…. well, way beyond what my expectations were. I dont want to scrap the main one or its two Tepid Standby machines, but I guess I’ll soon find out whether there is a market still for them, especially when whoever is buying them is going to have to come and collect them from Warwick. I have no intentions whatsoever of sending them through the post. Not a hope in hell.

And the other major matter of importance, which I didnt really expect to go in this direction, is the souring of the relationship with Soundcloud and Soundcloud Pro in particular. This has now broken down irrevocably and in due course, all of the material that I have historically had with Soundcloud will now be moved off of that platform and on to Bandcamp. I will no longer refer anyone to Soundcloud in order to hear any of my material apart from initial releases.

The crux of the problem revolved around monetisation, which was mainly the whole point of Soundcloud Pro. As I have repeatedly said, I didnt get into this to make money and will never charge for my work, but if someone else is running a streaming service or acting as a middle-man for a streamer and is making money out of my art, it is only fair that I get a percentage like everyone else. And, given that in its first two weeks, Monochrome seemed to do better than I had ever expected – Scarlet & Gold getting 1600+ plays in the first two weeks, more than I’ve ever had before – it became something that I became keen to sort out and to get as many of the tracks registered with PRS as possible and getting all the necessary data such as ISRC codes and the such like and then getting the tracks ready on Soundcloud Pro. So far so good, one would think.

Well, yes and no. Some of the uploading process can be a bit tortuous where a lot of the practise is automated and needs (in my very humble opinion) far too much validation and verification and I found that I kept on getting snagged by an automated process of Soundcloud’s which kept asking me for licensing details for my tracks because they were concerned that I had been using unauthorised samples, etc. This became particularly protracted when I uploaded the tracks that had been generated with Suno AI, forming the most recent release of mine, The Echo Of Unmade Miles.

I made sure that Suno was credited accordingly and was absolutely open and honest about AI’s part in the creation of these tracks and who did what. But, Soundcloud’s algorithm kept on rejecting them, asking for clearances and licenses and then it started happening to regular tracks that had no AI in them whatsoever, such as The Last Word, from Monochrome and they kept on getting rejected and rejected. This eventually pissed me off enough for me to complain to Soundcloud, after their AI bot proved utterly useless in trying to get me an answer to why this kept happening. Initially, their reply was lamentable. We will get back to you within two weeks but we’re extraordinarily busy. Coming from someone who has spent 20+ years in delivery of IT services, that was bad enough, but what followed after the first two weeks was laughable; sorry that it has taken this long to reach out to you, if the thing is still a problem, please reply to this ticket or create another one. Oh dear.

So, I did create another one, and another one and another one, particularly where it was related to the Suno created tracks. Eventually, got a rather sniffy reply about there being no generative AI content permitted on Soundcloud Pro and here is where it got interesting, you cannot use AI content at all on Soundcloud Pro unless you do it through one of their existing AI partners, and it lists 8 or so firms.

The first one at the top of the list, if you check them out, is a generative AI firm. There is a very … bitter, very prejudicial atmosphere around the use of Generative AI in the music industry at the moment, some of it very nasty and sneery. What Soundcloud really meant in this case is that you couldnt use Suno generated AI content, because they, Soundcloud, had already got a partnership with another Gen AI firm who probably gave them better margins and quite likely demanded that Suno should be excluded if the deal was to go through.

So, they dont have a problem with Gen AI per se, but only if the price is right. And a lot of the current fuss from industry insiders is that they dont have a problem with it in the publishing and label world, so long as they get a cut of it. Screw the artists and the composers, (much as there is much howling and wailing about “will someone please think of the poor artists”, the same ones they’ve been ripping off for generations with sharp practises, selling access to the artists work for streaming for a pittance), the main thing so far as they are concerned is that the copyright in the recorded works that they possess has to have a special licence, (which will obviously cost more for Gen AI producers like Suno), although in reality, it doesnt matter. Suno and other Gen AI producers train their engines on material already out there and the labels and publishers and the likes of YouTube dont give a flying one as to who listens so long as it chalks up another stat. The allusion that I had in my previous peice about it being absolutely no different whatsoever in the way that Difford and Tilbrook used to write, or Elton John and Bernie Taupin absolutely holds water. The only difference is the speed at which it happens, and the speed at which it learns. Takes humans a lifetime, takes machines mere minutes.

And as I’ve also been on record as saying, once the industry brings the AI world to heel and creates its own inescapable licensing jail, the amount of labels who will create their own AI based acts who will no doubt perform in future as holograms, (as per the most recent ABBA shows in London testify to), acts who dont in reality exist either because they are dead or because they were a creation of fiction in the first place and therefore will never be paid for what they allegedly create, will never have any kind of royalty/audit trail whatsoever… those who know the industry even in passing, know that they are indeed cynical enough to make this happen and I fully expect to see it well within the next decade.

But as I often say…. I digress. Suffice it to say, I refuse to play this game with Soundcloud Pro where I have to prove to them that my works are created without the use of unlicensed samples although their AI engine can accuse me of having done so without any evidence whatsoever in return for a piffling streaming rate. Im absolutely not going to tolerate that at all and it was clear that Soundcloud were not going to budge, so I quit. I told them where they could put their account and how far up they could insert it.

It also got me thinking about a new strategy for how I publicise my art and it is likely that this blog will co-exist alongside another format, such as a substack or something similar and I may use both together to generate more views of the art that I make. I still wont charge for it, that will never change, but I will need to work on a better way of increasing visibility. And ordinary Soundcloud may still be a front door at which some of the works may initially be publicised, but I will never ever go back to Soundcloud Pro. That is over and done. Watch this space, as they say.

And there are currently 4.1 million items deleted or deleting off of this particular legacy system. I think I’d better be prepared to settle down for the long haul where that is concerned, LOLZ.

But enough of all that. I stand at the precipice of a new way of creating and a new start in life for my art, I continue to contribute to the motion picture project Dogs!…Waiting To Be Loved as a voice artist and the advent of not only Suno but also other AI vocalising platforms such as the impending release of IK Multimedia’s Re-Sing offer some great potentials to go back and review some of the AlterZero and early KOAS works to see if they can be rolled in more glitter – or more diplomatically, be given a new lease of life. Plus there were some very old AlterZero tracks that never really made it to being recorded properly and were never properly captured and had justice done to them…. it would be nice to use the opportunity to be able to bring some of those old songs to life… White Flag Surrender, Paradise In Four Miles, Time Wont Change Things... those three in particular deserve to be made as good as I can get them.

And, in the meantime, AI assisted or not, I still intend to make good use of the time I have now, writing and composing and releasing from a newly inspired creative space.

4.3 million now and still counting. I’ll update you more when the new room is completely ready. It wont be too long…. and just as I finish this article, so does the deletion process.

Perfect timing. I’ll keep you all posted. Thanks for your patience and sticking with me.

Oh and just for clarity… the saved picture is not a real one, its AI generated. When the real room is done, I’ll share it.

Latest Update – and a “new” EP….

/ stevehunt18 / Leave a comment

“….We live in the shadows and
We had the chance and threw it awayAnd it’s never going to be the same‘Cause the years are falling by like the rainIt’s never gonna be the same‘Til the life I knew comes to my house and saysHello, hello (it’s good to be back)Hello, hello (it’s good to be back)….”

© Glitter/Noel Gallagher/Mike Leander, “Hello” from the album ‘Whats The Story Morning Glory?’, 1995

This is getting to be like London buses of old… nothing for ages, then three at once.

My last two posts were about two particular things; the release of the Monochrome EP which finally happened, after a long long gestation period and just immediately prior to that, my discovery of AI as a songwriting tool. Well, this particular post leans more on the latter as a source of inspiration as opposed to the former.

Monochrome has been uploaded to the usual place (my Soundcloud account) and has been monetized (my god, what an exercise in patience that was…. I can understand why a lot of artists dont bother…) and following on from that, I immersed myself fully in what Suno could do for me as a remote collaborative tool/substitute topline writer/composer/etc etc etc.

I made the effort to go trawling through a lot of old material, both that is on here and otherwise – going back indeed as far as the ideas for the soundtrack to a screenplay which I wrote back in 2005 called Chasing A Rainbow. Most of the songs from that period were composed from MIDI loops, both piano and drums and were somewhat limited in their scope, I think is probably the politest way of describing it… they were written as part of my learning process of being a writer and a lyricist. In most cases for that particular soundtrack, I had tried writing the more traditional way with the music first and the words being developed by scatting around it and seeing what fell out. In a lot of cases when it comes to songwriting, a lot of very successful artists have done just that for generations and it has worked admirably.

However…. when you’re trying to write something for a screenplay, thats a different matter, it has to tie in with the story. There were a couple of tracks on that screenplay soundtrack where I tried that and didnt really get anywhere in trying to get any music behind them… because I didnt really know how to compose properly at the time. Some might argue that I still dont, especially if I’m leaning on AI these days, but I dont need that kind of person in my life, LOLZ.

Anyway. I can feel myself digressing again, for a change. What I meant to say is that I’ve had a very good look around the collection of lyrics that I’ve got, many of which – most of which, actually – are on this site and have all their backstories in place. Some have ended up with revised names, but as I alluded to in one of my previous posts; the lions share of them have not done anything for the last decade from when they were written in a front room in Wiltshire; some had a cursory sniff from collaborators and one or two may have had versions recorded, as local demos for one particular collaborator but they have enough of their own material to publicise and they rightly play to their own strengths. And, I thought at the time, that I had written stronger stuff which in some cases, I did have the music for. For these songs, I had a kind of feel in mind, but no music and I didnt have the time back then to just keep on kicking ideas around until something happened, I had to concentrate on my profession and earning a living and the songs that I did have ready music for which ended up on the three EP’s that I’ve written and released already under the KOAS brand.

These other songs were languishing, but I always had complete confidence in the lyrics themselves and my experience with what Suno has managed to do with them has, to my mind, proven that. Even really difficult, challenging ambient pieces like Song For Jane and Epitaph – I had a notion as to what I wanted them to be, but somewhat embarrassingly for a producer, I hadnt a notion as to where to start. And, as I didnt have a female vocalist to hand and didnt really have the means to pay for a professional to do it – Suno has allowed me to bring these songs to life.

So….. I decided anyway to develop them into an album/EP … one that I elected to call The Echo Of Unmade Miles (A Collection Of Lost Hours).. and yes, that title was AI generated as well, LOLZ. Now, if I used all the tracks currently in the SUNO library, it would be enough for a triple album, if not more. However, while all the tracks are viable, not everyone of them is a standout. I will most likely make use of another of Suno’s features, which is being able to break out the tracks into stems and overdub them myself in Cubase once the house move is completed. And in that respect some of them may change again, and maybe others wont. Depends on how much time I get to indulge myself, LOLZ.

…but as it stands at the moment, the decision was taken to make use of the tracks that have been created from my lyrics using SUNO and to release them as The Echo Of Unmade Miles. They are in the usual place on Soundcloud, namely here:

I also made the effort to generate as much about this particular project around AI as I could, so that I could set it distinctly apart from the rest of my works, particularly Mondegreen, (which I still have to finish); the pictures used for the album cover/artwork were all generated in Chat GPT, the concept being that it is paying tribute to my Anglo American/Puerto Rican heritage, that I am half New Yorker, carrying a guitar case and walking towards a rainbow…. maybe even chasing it. Cant possibly imagine where that idea came from, LOLZ.

So… to draw things to a conclusion, so that I can get on with packing to move house (tomorrow, before you ask, so I am a tad up against it timewise), the material is out there, I hope that you get a chance to listen to it and to see if you like it; there should be a good, recognisable lyrical thread to the material and as always, I hope you enjoy it. As I say, it may get revisited in a year or two, once the new studio room is set up and the idea of re-doing/remixing a good number of the tracks from No Expectations has not been completely discounted…. there is a lot to do. And thats before we think about writing anything new so, theres a lot going on. Coins In A Fountain, Burning Bridges, Song For Jane, Unspoken Words, Epitaph, Song For Jane, Strange Girl, Heart and Every Time I See Her are ones that I am particularly happy with and are good standalone works that could have been written/performed by a real commercial writing team (ahem).

But, have a listen when you get the chance over the summer please and absolutely feel free to let me know what you think; both of the songs themselves and the whole AI In Music debate which is raging like a brushfire at the moment.

Til next time, I hope you enjoy the summer.

Time Demands… and the way forward

/ stevehunt18 / Leave a comment

“….Fire in the mirror, sky turns black
Voices whisper, no way back
Shadows dancing, freedom calls
We rise again, as the silence falls…..”

© The Velvet Sundown, “As The Silence Falls”, 2025

Well…. a month is a long time in songwriting, so it would seem. No updates for a couple of years and then suddenly two come along together less than a month apart. Almost like London buses, as they used to say.

There have been things going on and there is a reason for this update which may provoke some conversation or exchanges of views, it may not.

Firstly, the more important one is that Monochrome is at the mastering stage which I am hoping to complete this week so that I can get it out there into the world before I have to shut everything down and complete my packing to move house in early August. Its not exactly clear when the new studio will be set up, but I seriously doubt that it will be this side of October 2025 if I tell the truth. So, getting Monochrome out of the door is an important step and its almost there.

The second thing that has happened in the last few days which has put a shot of adrenaline into my metaphorical musical arm is the arrival of AI. Now, as the lyrics above relate to, there has been a lot of noise around this particular band that went from nowhere to Spotify playlists and over a million plays in next to no time where they absolutely rose without trace and a lot of the usual music business YouTube community has been chuntering about it quite extensively.

Is it a cynical creation from nothing by a record label in order to generate more income but leaving no visible trace that has any royalty responsibilities going forward with all the rights being held by the label and is this a sign of, unless it is stopped, the way that the music industry is going to go?

Arguably yes and almost certainly yes, to answer both questions.

Anyway. Digression over… I was unwittingly steered in the direction of one of the AI Music creation sites by one of these commentators and decided to take a look at it. The AI Music creation site I decided to take a look at was Suno.

… and by the way, this post is in no way paid or sponsored by them, LOLZ.

As you well know if you’ve followed me thus far (and if you havent, where the hell have you been?), I am primarily a lyricist, and I have, surprise surprise, lots of lyrics around here on this here site, a lot of them from a purple patch around 10-12 years ago when it all just seemed to pour out while I was living in Wiltshire and a lot of those have gone nowhere. I havent done anything with them and while there were some very very loose – and I mean seriously loose – preconceptions about the forms that some of them would take, a number of them were more like free-form poems than lyrics. Some of them I was quite happy with in terms of their phrasing and their structure and what they said but had no attendant musical structure or ideas to go with them and others, because they didnt quite come out fully formed were just added to the site and then left to grow the proverbial moss all over them.

So, it seemed like a tool like Suno might be able to offer a writer like me some sort of perspective on these lyrics, if I were to enter them into the AI toolset and choose some either quite loose or quite strict musical criteria as to what the end product should sound like. There were a whole pile of different musical styles to choose from, some quite genre specific, some quite woolly, some quite ethereal and others that I’d never heard of and were just plain damned confusing, LOLZ.

As there was a free option, I chose that to see what it could do with some of the trickier customers that I’d had which maybe one or two collaborators might have picked up on but havent really progressed… and others that had just been buried and forgotten about. What could be the worst that could happen?

First one into the fiery pit was Come Home Soon. Loosely inspired by a Marillion theme of being far away and its quicker to come home by finishing the entire journey rather than abandoning it, but with an original Nora Jones meter, this one hadnt gone anywhere really. Dave Barnes had had a go at it but I havent heard it for years. So, this was the proverbial sacrificial lamb to the AI Beast.

And the result that came out were thus….

https://suno.com/s/ligMXj2rlmopTEnM

Very pleasantly surprised and bordering on the shocked that it look less than 20 seconds to offer me not one but two interpretations. Based on the following criteria: unplugged, natural, honest, poignant, longing, soaring, authentic.

Granted its not 24/96, its not dripping in the blood, sweat and tears of my honest musical labours (chance’d be a fine thing), but in many respects; this is no different to me giving some lyrics to a topline writer or a “real” musician (not that I’d know what any of those look like these days, LOLZ) and for them to go “aaaahhh, yes, I’ve got just the thing for that!” – like a proverbial Elton John who just sits behind a page of Taupin lyrics and it just pours out…. and like Mick Hucknall said that Laurent Dozier was like when writing songs for the A New Flame album – the melodies and toplines just kept pouring out and pouring out and he was like a kid trying to put his finger in the dam to try and keep the flow under control and to be able to use it and channel all this musical energy.

I readily agree that to a lot of real musicians, this may be seen as the spawn of Satan that we must crush and do so decisively and do it now before it all becomes self aware and destroys us all, but I repeat…. how really is it different to giving lyrics to a topline writer or composer, especially these days by email? I dont think it is that different. Especially when you consider now the established tools that some of us have been using for years like EZ Drummer and EZ Keys and the use of midi files and midi loops to compose. Like having a session player next to you, their advertising strapline used to read. And a lot of those tools have enabled me, a non-playing – well more like a “not really playing” musician to be able to produce coming up on 4 albums worth of work.

Bloody hell, I thought. If I get to be even more specific or granular with what I ask it to do, what is this thing capable of?

So what did I do? Did I frantically try and weld the lid back on the can of worms in the corner that says “Danger-Worms! Do Not Open!”?

Did I hell. I added a couple more of the more challenging sets of lyrics that I liked but hadnt done anything with. I dove in and drank the lake dry, LOLZ. Dont Talk About It followed:

https://suno.com/s/SKJJUxtfEPldka4r

Not quite as funky as I had first imagined it, as it had a kind of James Grant feel to it when I first wrote those lyrics. From the criteria of: warm reverb, expressive percussion, raw male vocals, polished, acoustic drums, eighties, commercial, 120BPM, this is what it brought me and I have to say, I thought ok, thats workable, thats viable, maybe I can build something from that…. whats next?

Well, that was the proverbial floodgate opening. OK, lets give it some really tricky ones, like Once Was Promising.

I mean, this thing was inspired by Midnight Rider by The Allman Brothers ferchrissakes. And while it doesnt sit in the same postcode, its not a million miles away and to my mind, it proves the lyrics were strong enough in the first place. Now I thought, we’re starting to find some genuinely viable tracks that could either be pushed out in their own right, or that I could re-record properly based on what Suno had composed.

And each of these had taken less than 20 seconds to be generated.

https://suno.com/s/0ayOEfJ1WClsvMoM

and it goes on and on. Touch, Another Day, Never Be Mine, Unspoken Words, Deep Deep Blue, All That You Wanted, The Wishing Game, Burning Bridges, Song For Jane, Strange Girl, Amorphous… Once I had ran out of free goes to weigh up whether it was worth using this toolset, the decision was taken for me to be a subscriber and the decision made itself. All of these sets of lyrics, as honestly and earnestly as they were written, were the proverbial problem children that didnt have the music to turn them into songs.

Now they do.

And there are all manner of styles there that these songs have been performed in by Suno’s toolsets; Green Day, Clannad, The Calling, Michael Buble–like jazz, Country Meets Rickenbacker 12 string, hell theres even a Motown-y one that is like Al Green sings the cynical lyrics of Paul Heaton. (aka Heart On A Shelf)

https://suno.com/s/wU6oNxUPrZtDJf6N

And if you pardon the vernacular, that really f**king works and all these were from first drafts, without a detailed understanding of what the toolset can really do when it is pushed.

At this point I was starting to get quite…. I dont know if I’d go as far as “excited”, but it was really something to think “damn, I knew these were good lyrics that just needed a good producer or another musician/collaborator to bring them to life”.. and Song For Jane… well, that really exceeded expectations. That was, when I first heard it, so beautifully encapsulating what I wanted it to say that it almost brought me to tears. Woah.

So…. the library is there to show what can be done with those lyrics and what Suno has done with them. Rights-wise, as the lyricist I have the copyright share that I would expect to.

I didnt write them to make money, but as with any collaboration, I have no problem in Suno taking a percentage if these tracks make any money. If it chooses to and if it can leverage its catalogue of works to be able to make money that may find its way back to contributors like me that covers the annual subscription fee (unlikely, I know, LOLZ) then so much the better.

Much as I’d loved to have created them with real collaborators, as I’ve had a full time career up to now, I’ve not really had the time to do so and my usual collaborators have all got their own real lives to be getting on with.

I dont need them –  my collaborators or my lyrics that is – to make money, much as I think that they might deserve to, thats not my decision.

As Gordon Sumner once observed at the Brits many many years ago when he was festooned with a lifetime achievement award, “music is its own reward”. At the time I thought that “well, given you live in a country mansion like a Squire, practising tantric sex and disappearing up ones own fundament to count the millions in royalties, yes, it probably is…”

Its something that is very easy to say when you’ve already reached a position of commercial success.

But…. as age often does, it teaches you that actually…. actually, theres something in that statement. It brings its own joy. I dont need to do it for a living. But, I would be happy to, if the opportunity arose, to move it from hobbyist semi-professional to something else.

I am very conscious of the fact that in about 3 weeks time I will be sixty years old. Much as I hope to have a lot of time to be able to devote to creating music, getting contiguous blocks of time to build up songs like these is going to be challenging. And some of these – no, the majority of these – songs are already a decade old and have languished doing nothing. The use of a toolset like Suno has afforded me the chance to bring these songs to life and give them a chance to breathe on their own.

And the AI performers sure as hell sing a damn sight better than I’ve been able to in 25 years, if not longer, LOLZ.

And as a writer, I have to take that opportunity and embrace it. So, while a lot of other musicians or creators may eye AI’s involvement in the future with a great deal of suspicion and justified cynicism, I defy them to say to solo lyricists like me that this song doesnt work, because I would argue passionately that it fluppin’ well does…

https://suno.com/s/dVIsywCyRopa1jgd

Yes, the industry will cynically exploit AI and what it creates for money. That is a given. They have been cynically exploiting performers, real human performers, for decades and always will do, if people insist on signing deals with labels and publishers. It is the apex predator of capitalist industries, using Intellectual Property to make money and denying the creators of those works the ownership of those works as a default. There have been a lot of dark and bad things written about the industry over the years and the vast majority of them are true.

I fully support and understand artists deciding to remain totally independent and actively choosing not to sign to a label these days and remaining in full control of their careers. It is a very different musical age that we’re living in.

Without tooting my own horn too loud, I’m as good a lyricist as anyone on my day. And this set of tools helps me to prove it.

The other part of the update, aside from this huge elephant in the room, is how does this affect Mondegreen? Is the album still going to take the same form when it eventually gets worked on later in the year?

Most likely yes. The work is very advanced on Mondegreen and I’ll need to review it in more detail when the new studio is built to make sure I’m still wholly on board with it. I reserve the right to change my mind, LOLZ.

There is though (and here we come, after a very long, tortuous journey to get there), the possibility of a follow on work, which may – I havent decided yet – include some of these works from Suno that I may re-work or keep as they are but remix (and provide my own instrumentation and production). There are other lyrics and lines in books that I have that havent been included in songs yet, but that are worthy of going somewhere.

Conceptually, the collection of songs that could be formed for these tracks is called Time Demands. I had thought of Abcission or a couple of other names for collections of future tracks, but I quite like Time Demands. That came along when I was trying to write a song for a friend who probably doesnt need music right now – or rather he thinks he doesnt – and while the lyrical ideas came, they didnt really gel into anything. But, time does demand that I pull my finger out and get on with it and thats what I intend to do.

So, the future does indeed look interesting in terms of what I can do with my music. I should imagine that I may well release the Suno versions will at some point under a collective name, but we’ll see. That decision hasnt been taken yet.

The next you’ll hear of me should be by the end of next week at the latest when Monochrome should be released.

Til then, my friends.

Latest Update, June 2025

/ stevehunt18 / 2 Comments

“…If everything could ever be this real forever
If anything could ever be this good again
The only thing I’ll ever ask of you
You’ve got to promise not to stop when I say when…”

© David E. Grohl, 1997 from the album “The Colour And The Shape”

Well… its been a long, long time. I havent updated this blog since like, forever. Thats not to say that there haven’t been things happening. There absolutely have been, I can promise you that, LOLZ.

Thank you for coming back and returning to this long, long old journey with me. I’m sorry I’ve kept you waiting for so long.

…but there has been an awful lot of Real Life Getting In The Way, which I guess is something that happens a lot to creatives, whether they be professionals or not. Whilst I have been pushing on with the two KOAS EP’s (and boy has that progress been millimetric at times), I have not been writing for a while. Most of the creative efforts have been around slowly but surely inching the two KOAS EP’s closer and closer to the finish line.

And they are indeed, almost there.

Well, to be specific, one of them is. Monochrome is at a very advanced stage and is due to be finished within the next 4 weeks. Mondegreen, on the other hand has faced some challenges along the way and as a result is going to slip until probably the autumn of this year when I will do my best to finish it.

More of Monochrome later on.

Mondegreen, on the other hand…. While I was quite content with the tracks as they’d been built, no matter how much I tried to bash Hate into shape and to bring the lyrics into it which I had written, they just wouldnt fit. No matter what. That was kinda disappointing because in and of themselves, as components, they were good. They just wouldnt play nicely together and it quickly became obvious that it had to be at least temporarily parked while I got on with the rest of the project.

So, something told me that I had to put that song to one side and come back to it some other time. It could be that the music and the lyrics will be parted out and end up coming back to life in other compositions that are wildly different from what I conceived for them, its too early to tell.

In its place came Love Me Or Leave Me Alone, which has had a sniff at Real Life already, thanks to my long time collaborator David Barnes, (or David Bjorn as he is now known). It is pretty much in the form that I envisaged that it would be, with the exception of the Nutini-style vocals which I heard in my minds ear when I first wrote the words.

In terms of it being a good enough track to be included on the Mondegreen EP and for it to be thematically correct to be on it, it definitely ticks those boxes. There are going to be three covers that are on that EP (I cant remember if I said what they would be or not, so just in case I didnt, I’m going to be open about it now). They are three tracks that have had a profound effect on me over the years and ones that I had been confident (at some point) that I would have been able to do some sort of justice to. They were originally meant to be just piano and voice, but I would be kidding myself if I were to stand there with my chest puffed out thinking that I had strong enough piano chops or indeed a strong enough voice to be able to really pull these tracks off in their simplest form.

So, I had to think somewhat laterally and I think the best way of putting it is that I should capitalise on the bits that I can really do properly and then leverage the other things at my disposal to make these versions all that they could be.

….Which is a euphemism for tuning software and EZKeys, LOLZ.

I have no shame in admitting it. Those who really know me know that I have no problem in leaning on technology. I dont lean on technology like a drunk does to a lamp-post, but I do try and make as much of it as I need to in order to achieve my objective (ahem).

These songs are important to me and its important that I do them justice.

Anyway, stop beating around the bush, Steve I hear you say. What are the three songs that are being covered?

Well, the first one is Faith Healer by The Big Dish, from the album Creeping Up On Jesus. I first heard this song in Cyprus in 1987 when it was released and it truly changed my life. I love Steven Lindsay’s work and as a vocalist and as a writer, he has been a huge huge influence on me as his work is honest, methodical and sincere. I did contemplate as to whether it should have been Miss America or Across The Provinces from the later Satellites album instead, but no, Faith Healer was a seminal track for me.

The second one is A Wing & A Prayer by The Mission from the album Children, produced by John Paul Jones. I’ve long been a huge fan of Wayne Hussey as a guitar player and as a writer for decades and I strongly believe that in both capacities he is sadly under-recognised. I cant explain why, but while A Wing & A Prayer is mainly wordplay, there is something about it that I always thought would make a good piano and vocal track, to let the lyrics and the vocal performance really, really shine. Its the one that secretly I hope that someone eventually does on The Voice, LOLZ. Am I the one to be able to do that? Well, I gave it my best shot.

The third one and arguably the most ambitious of all, is Advice For The Young At Heart by Tears For Fears, the closing track of side 1 of the Seeds Of Love album. Roland Orzabal is one of the writers that I have respected very deeply and been heavily inspired by for many, many years now and this track written by him and Nicky Holland is…. well…. musically, its not that tricky, but vocally it is particularly challenging considering Curt Smith spent most of the pre-chorus deep in his falsetto range.

And, despite Roland’s undisputed vocal virtuosity, listening to the demos that he cut at the Townhouse back in 1988/89, it didnt suit him. The final cut had to be done by Curt. It is really challenging to try and do it properly and I’ve had to make some comprimises in how I approached it, so while I have done my best to honour the song, it is a little different to what you might expect.

The song itself, and its lyrical content, has meant so much to me for so many years, especially the lines

“… Love is a promise, love is a souvenir
Once given, never forgotten
Never let it disappear
This could be our last chance
When we gonna make it work?…”

I find it poignant, I find it relevant to what I think and to my “lived experience” as the kids call it these days, to how I feel and believe and I wanted to have a go at it.

So, the three covers tracks for Mondegreen are thus. Hence the concept of a Mondegreen being something you think you’ve heard before, but not in the way you think you have. I think I’ve met that particular threshold, LOLZ.

… but that is going to take some time to finish yet. There is still quite a bit more polishing to do on that EP and I dont really have the time available at the moment to do so.

I am due to retire from the IT industry in less than two months time and also am going to be moving house, so my studio space is going to be very very different to what it has been for the last decade and a half since I started writing. So, I have to concentrate on Monochrome at the moment and push the target completion date out to the autumn at least so that I can at least start that mixing and mastering stage for Mondegreen with a clean slate. That is likely to happen on new equipment as well and will definitely be done in a different recording and mixing space in Warwick instead of in Rugby where I have been since 2017.

Monochrome, as I say, is in quite an advanced state and I am spending a good amount of time during the evenings whenever possible polishing and mixing and eq’ing and compressing and balancing… I’m at the stage now where I’ve completed the stem mixes and the final mixes arent that far off. I’m due to move, as I say, in early August and I am setting a target of the middle of July for Monochrome to be completed and released. So, by that point it has to be as good as I can get it.

In the meantime… I have also become an organic gardener, growing my own produce (which is another equally addictive creative past-time that I never expected to pick up) and I have also become involved with a motion picture/musical project through the US family which I have been doing some recent character/voice acting readings… which may or may not go somewhere.

I hope to have proven myself worthy of a place on this particular project, but that is the decision of the Executive Producer and her team, so we’ll see what happens there; I am also, as I have noted before, coming to the tail end of my 42 year long IT industry career which I am hoping not to have to go back to at any point; we are not going to be under any kind of financial pressure to go back into the workplace, so I am hoping to spend the majority of my retirement as a writer and producer and maybe a voice artist, but time will tell.

In the meantime, my existing flat has to be de-cluttered, I have to work out what I’m taking and what is being junked, I have to hand over my professional responsibilities to my successor at work… there is an awful lot going on and I am at probably one of the busiest points in my life and am likely to remain in that heightened state until probably October.

And I’m going to be 60 in less than 2 months.

I know I’ve not said a lot for quite a while.

…but it doesnt mean I havent been doing anything. Absolutely not, I’ve been as busy as hell.

And hopefully, I will get to keep this blog up to date a lot more than what I have been doing.

I’m back….. Back For Good? I hope so……

Revolution In The Rain

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‘Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
Step out of line, the men come and take you away
We better stop
Hey, what’s that sound?
Everybody look, what’s going down?‘

© Stephen Stills, ‘For What Its Worth‘, (Buffalo Springfield) 1966


With the exception of This Time (which was a collaborative effort on a BASCA songwriting weekend a few years ago, recorded for the London Road album), I’ve never really been one for protest songs. And, to be honest, This Time was a little bit cheeky in that it was peppered deliberately with buzzwords and was slightly facetious as it wasn’t really coming from the typical protest song angle that it may have initially have seemed to… it was more taking the piss out of a certain type of middle class protester who values being seen protesting a subject for just long enough on the right channels without fully understanding what kinds of sacrifices, what kinds of impacts that the thing they’re protesting about is likely to have on the rest of the society that they’re part of – and ultimately, it will be their kids or the children of their peers who will be left to clear up the crap, to coin a phrase which is something I believe a lot of them to be ignorant of. As usual, no names, no pack drill. I think we could all call to mind a certain group of protestors, regardless of our political leanings who we may see as being less than sincere in their endeavours…

In other words, what certain people may term as virtue signallers. And to that end, it did what it needed to pretty well.

Revolution In The Rain though, is somewhat different and despite it coming to me in the same way as the other two tracks from the Mondegreen EP, is arguably very much driven by the global events of the last twelve to eighteen months. The vision was quite sixties/Beatles/Byrds/Thunderclap Newman but with a lead vocal melody that sounded for all the world like a mature Steve Hogarth, a vocalist that I have admired for many, many years and who is significantly more political, especially in his more recent years, although I see things somewhat different to he does.

So there is almost an original sixties “counter-culture” protest feel to it (very different to the modern day ‘Cancel Culture’, which I frankly despise), and it is very different to anything I’ve written before.

And, as alluded to before in the case of Hate, the only part of it that I got sent was the vocal hook; there is no chorus as such, just a repeating three or four line motif that just repeats over and over again and is broken up by a Middle 8 – so it has an A-A-B-A type format.

The lyrics themselves were not difficult to write and the vocal hook for the song came with it anyway – but a Revolution In The Rain is a quintessentially English thing, so it strikes me, that in a nation as wet and windy and rainy as the UK, if such a thing is ever to happen, it will need to happen when the weather is not exactly on their side. A little like a personification of Roger Waters’ quite brilliant ‘hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way’ line from ‘Time’, way back in 1973. The British do not have the somewhat more fiery approach of the French or indeed the Spanish and seem to have the longest fuse of pretty much any nation on earth as to how much antagonising or provocation they will endure before they snap. So, if any such thing is to happen in the UK (and for the record, because of the nature of how the English are in particular, I do not see it happening in my lifetime), it is likely to be somewhat different to other such events that we may have seen around the globe over the last 100 years.

I have tried as hard as I could to be non partisan about it, but with all protest songs there has to be something that the writer is railing against, in order to make their point and this is no exception. The last great truly musically productive era in British music, one that spawned a level of protest music that spoke to a generation was punk (and the subsequent lead up to Thatcherism) in the late 1970s/early 1980s. There hasnt really been anything since then that has truly caught the imagination in the same way not just the UK, but worldwide, despite the things that have occurred in the last 25 years, let alone 35 – things like the advance of globalism, 9/11, the Financial crisis of 2008, the Arab Spring and many other worldwide events. It is as if the music industry has largely decided to be very selective about what types of writers and performers that it espouses in terms of social commentary; Theres not much of a machine for the RATM boys to rage against any more; Mr Bragg is mostly in retirement in a very nice cliff-side Dorset des res; Mr Dylan has sold off his publishing rights to his back catalogue for multi-millions and even Mr Weller has long since ceased being a strident advocate of a particular political doctrine that he made his reputation as a writer on.

And, without being deliberately provocative: these times that we find ourselves in are probably the most polarised that I and no doubt many others have every known; this is something where I do finally for once in my life, not just as a songwriter but also as a man, have to stick a flag in the ground and say “this subject really genuinely bothers me”, which it absolutely does; but not for the same reason that it bothers other people who are close to me.

Whether this is a line that it is possible for a songwriter to attempt to straddle in this day and age of cancellation, or whether I can even get away with what the song is clearly drawing parallels with – lines like “less than a hundred years since ‘Never again'” and the references to book burning are pretty explicit about the historical events they are referring to and those lines were deliberately written to be unequivocal about that. Whether others may see it the same way or not, I do not know. My intention, as ever, is not to be preachy about it, but to say what I feel about something that bothers me a lot, as someone who has spent most of his time as a songwriter writing more about love, loss, healing and abandonment than anger. But, in the words of a certain John Lydon Esq “Anger Is An Energy” and it has its place in the spectrum of human emotions.

My collaborators before me, particularly my very good friend Robert Pearce have been able to write this type of material before and do it very effectively… for me though, its a new thing and I don’t expect to be making a habit of it. As I say, I’m not advocating openly for any particular change apart from that which people want to be for themselves, which I always have espoused; be the change you yourself wish to be, you can change no more than that. And maybe, if we all change to be all that we can be, maybe we will be less easily led by those who clearly do not practise the kind of altruism that they claim to on our behalf.

Revolution In The Rain is to be part of the Mondegreen EP and will be finished later this year.


Revolution In The Rain

{V1}
When you dont know who to believe any more
And you’re wondering just what its all for
All you see around you is your world in pain

When your faces can be held to the floor
For having the nerve to step outside your door
And your world will never be the same again
Waiting for a revolution in the rain

{V2}
When those you followed left and turned off all the lights
And left you in the dark with no end in sight
And all your streets are in drenched fear and broken glass night after night
You wonder when you’ll see your friends again.
Isolation, libation, frustration, negation,
Watching for the revolution in the rain

{Middle 8}
Take another drink
Push it all to the back of your mind
Every time you do, for all the good it could do,
It all seems just a little further behind
No one knows how long it will last
Til we’ve all been made to forget our pasts
A new take on all your childrens dreams
And you learn that Build Back Better aint all that it seems

{V3}
When all the memories of you are swept out of the door
And your body is not your own any more
Less than a hundred years since “Never Again”

You can be just another name in a book thats been burned
Or you can be one that makes your voice heard
Deny the lies that have turned the world around you insane
Be your own revolution in the rain

Never let them do this to you again

Dont let them reduce you to this again

Lead your own revolution in the rain


{Ad lib to fade}



© Words and Music, Steven McCarthy-Hunt 2021

Album Release Day

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London Road and No Expectations are now released and out in the wild and available to listen to on this website, in both wav file and mp3 formats, depending on your available bandwidth. They should also be downloadable too.

This draws the creation stage of this project to a close and it is almost time to start the next one which I am looking to get going around early June; there are some other production tracks which I have been recording and working on for friends for some time but have been on the back burner while this project has been in gestation. These can now be brought back to life before the next KOAS album project starts.

I’ll start a new series of blog pages as the new tracks are all being recorded and in some cases written and the journey will begin all over again.

Thank you for your patience in waiting for these songs to be brought to life; it was a long old road, but the objective has been reached; a musical legacy to the important people in my life which immortalises their contribution to who and what and how I am.

I hope you like them and are also going to join me on the next musical journey when it comes along.

KOAS Album News

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I’ve just returned from Florida in the last 36 hours and there was a lot of time not only for contemplating the subject of what to do with the KOAS album/EP releases but also to discuss the matter with two experienced professionals who have been there, bought the T-shirt and much more on many occasions and also to examine some options.

Previously, I had looked at both TuneCore and CDBaby as possible outlets for a formal release of both London Road and No Expectations and I’ve also considered doing a small print run of CD’s. All these options are still in the background and may be taken up on but a number of conversations and reactions while I was in the US have led me to the decision that I have taken today. The first was one that I already knew anyway, but was confirmed by a highly reputable US Producer and Mix Engineer re-emphasising how challenging it is to get songs cut these days by professional artists (and theres no reason to believe that the US and UK are any different in that respect); the second was that given the strongest part of my suit is that of lyricism – and I was aware of this anyway and had been reminded of it before – the words are largely lost on those who were listening. Part of that comes of them being very personal, which I was aware of anyway and proceeded with full knowledge of that fact; and lastly that I never set out to make either of these offerings to make money. That was never a factor. The intention in the case of London Road was for it to be a calling card for collaborative writing, like an actors showreel. The intention of No Expectations was for it to be a cathartic musical legacy to four important people in my life.

So, the decision that was taken was that the albums will be released on here and will be free to download by anyone who wants them, whenever they want them. No need for any registration, no pricing – just simple downloads of either Apple m4a tracks or .wav files at 16bit/44.1khz, which despite being several times the size, are also more open and sound much better as they have more dynamic range. If anyone wishes to donate anything when they download the music, they can do, and if they dont want to, they dont have to. The key thing is that the songs are listened to, regardless. The only person who puts any real financial value on these songs as memories (yet), is me. But their emotional value to me is obviously, much higher than what it cost to record and release them.

Over the next week or so, I will finalise the artwork and the mastering output levels for the files and add the appropriate buttons on this site to enable easy access to the albums. As it stands at this precise moment, everything has been mastered with the requirements of iTunes and the two aforementioned aggregators in mind which are to put it politely, quite conservative – nothing peaks louder than -8.2db, so it never gets really loud at all and if anything for domestic consumption, they’re probably a tad too quiet and can be boosted a bit (this was the main question I had for the Producer/Mix Engineer as he has vast experience of finishing mixes prior to mastering and his Maximizer plugin is permanently glued into the red). These tweaks are minor ones which will take only a few short hours to accomplish, so I’m targeting the May Bank Holiday as a release date for both offerings. I can then close this particular project and then move on to the next one over the summer, which I have to admit, I’m quite upbeat about. I’ll be able to apply all the many lessons I’ve learned during the gestation of these two which should  – hopefully –  mean the time to releasing the difficult second album should be shorter (famous last words, no doubt, LOL).

So.. in closing… watch this space. The release date for both London Road and No Expectations is imminent.

Latest News on Project KOAS

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“You are far
I’m never gonna be your star
I’ll pick up the pieces and mend my heart
Maybe I’ll be strong enough
I don’t know where to start
But I’ll never find peace of mind,
While I listen to my heart
People…
You can never change the way they feel
Better let them do just what they will
For they will…. If you let them….” 
© George Michael, Kissing A Fool, 1988

Well… its 9.45 in the evening in the UK and as it stands right now…. the mastering work on the albums is now finished.

Its been quite challenging and educational for someone who has largely been a hands-off engineer and aspiring Producer  – when it comes to putting together demos of both my own work and those for others, at least… I’ve had the ideas but there has always been someone who makes a living from engineering or mastering or producing to put that final fairy dust on the finished product.

When it comes to putting together something in your own name though, the goal was always to make it as good as I could with the experience that I had. And…. as I’m the closest one to the project, I can hear all the lumps and bumps and imperfections and things that make me think “… yeah, I should really go back and fix that…” So, it’ll never be perfect. Such things very rarely are. Indeed, some figure that all the lumps and bumps make it a bit more honest and… real. FWIW, I think the jury is out on that.

But, with respect to the other old adage which goes along the lines of  “there are never any finished mixes, only abandoned ones”, I can honestly, hand on heart, listen back to the final 2 track masters and be glad of what I have and I’m happy for them to be let loose on the world as they are… They are as good as I can get them to be (and believe me, I’ve tried, LOL), with my level of expertise as a player, a singer, a writer and a producer… at this stage of my career, that is. Next time… now that might be different. But more of that later.

There certainly were some interesting challenges along the way in trying to get the completed .wav files to sound as good as I could when mastering them into “lossy”/compressed formats like m4a, MP3 and so on. That took quite a lot of test pressings to get right and finally getting hold of Mastered For iTunes tools from Apple as well. Once that particular hurdle was out of the way, the rest of it was pretty much a downhill run to the finish line although it did take quite a few late nights, which I think have started to catch up with me recently!

As per the last blog update, the albums have been sequenced, they have all been put through a good mastering package (Izotope Ozone 7) and then treated with another very handy vst, Waves Abbey Road Vinyl which gives them that kind of old vinyl warmth and fuzzyness around the edges, taking off some of the harshness.  They were all recorded, mixed and mastered on headphones (Beyer DT770 Pro) –  the intended listening medium for these songs has always been headphones, never monitors and I would venture that a lot of people who may well listen to this music will do so over earbuds or headphones; it has been mastered with them in mind. I’ve also very consciously made sure I’m on the right side of the loudness wars as well and everything has been mastered very conservatively, peaking at no more than -8.2db, to ensure that if it gets submitted to the likes of iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, etc that the songs can make sure they’re within the loudness restrictions that these providers have stipulated.

Ah yes, iTunes, Amazon, Spotify etc. There comes the big final question and the one that I have not yet decided to answer: After having waved my own flags so hard for the last two years on this project, its not lost on me that I have to make a decision (always a bad thing, LOL) about what to do with these songs now I’ve given them life. Do I keep them locked up in the proverbial basement on a diet of bread and water (obviously not, I’m not that creepy) or do I let them fly with the best chance they’ve got of reaching new shores, but charge them a Club Class ticket price for doing so?

Or…. to be less cryptic/obtuse…. “Do I give them away for free, or do I sell them?”

I’m kinda torn where this is concerned. London Road is and always has been a calling card, almost like a demo album to advertise my ability to to other musicians, writers, producers, etc as a marker of my ability as a songwriter and lyricist, proving that I can play nicely with others, LOL. No Expectations was always a musical legacy to not only my late father (who kept on sending me damned jazz music to write, from the other realm… I used to hate jazz. You’ve no idea how much, hahaha…), but also to three very, very important women in my life who came into it and when they left it, they left leaving huge footprints on my heart that no rainstorms will ever wash away. It was never, ever going to be about money. It was about doing something that I hoped would be remembered, so that neither they nor what I thought of them would ever be forgotten. It is much more thematically coherent than London Road and that was always the intention.

So, I’m in a bit of a quandary. Part of me wants to go the Radiohead way and just put it out there and invite people to just take it and if they want to make a donation, they can, but if they dont, then so long as they give the material a listen, I dont mind. In the most recent distribution from PRS4Music that I’ve had, songs that I have co-written are starting to earn me some royalties, which is great. It’ll never be enough for me to retire on, but I never expected it to. All of the material is registered and if it ever pops up anywhere and gets played where the collection societies get to know about it, a few cents will roll into my hat. And thats fine. I’m happy with that. Limousines, the devils dandruff and private jets are all so passe anyway, LOL. 

The other part of me says that if I’m to put the material where it has the best chance of being heard by not only the wider public – ie, aggregators like Tunecore, CDBaby and so on – there has to be some kind of concept as to how much it is going to cost. So, I have to bring money into it, whether I like it or not. I can distribute it myself via this site or a similar one, but the reach is not going to be as good as what it would be through an aggregator.

Lots of food for thought then, while I go to Florida on holiday to see the family for a week…

Ultimately, what it boils down to is that both albums, regardless of which way they walk out of the front door of my life, to find their place in the world, should be released digitally in early May 2018.

And then onto the next project. I’ve already got half an idea as to what I’m going to call it (but thats for another post) and I’ve already got some tracks that are in gestation that I would like to feature on it and the overall musical direction it will go in. And this will be something that I will record with the motivation of selling it, as opposed to being so open to the idea of giving it away.

The big difference this time, I’m not going to be so dumb as to chain myself to a timescale. It’ll be ready when its ready. When I’ve returned from Florida and that final decision regarding distribution has been made, then I’ll put up another post announcing what it is, and where the material will be available from and so on and so on…

 

Project KOAS Album Track Listings and Running Orders

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The decision has been made on the track listings and running order for the upcoming album and EP that have formed the KOAS project. As per the original goal, one album will be comprised exclusively of collaborative material (London Road) and the other will be self written (No Expectations).

As mentioned before, there is always an exception to every rule and the exception in this case is Five Years, which is a collaborative track between myself and Robert Pearce, but is thematically much better placed to be on this album than London Road.

Track Listing and Running order for No Expectations:

Stay
The Fear Of Missing Out
Stars
Let It Go
No Getting Over You
Doesn’t Matter Now
What Became Of Love
Castles In The Sky
Five Years

Track Listing and Running order for London Road:

Elia
Escape From The Shadows
Come Talk To Me
South To The Sun
Without You
This Time

I don’t expect any changes to be made to these listings following final mixdown and mastering; I’m confident that this is going to be the finished running order in both cases. I also expect both to be completed and available by early May at the very latest.

I’ll share more detail when it becomes clearer.

 

Update on Project KOAS

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I normally post some lyrics from a famous song at this point, but right now I’m pretty sure that what I was going to use, I’ve used already somewhere else. Much as I might repeat myself thematically for now where my songwriting is concerned, I try not to make a habit of it when citing other songwriter’s works, LOL.

It has been a long while since I posted an update though, so without further ado, I’d better get to it.

The mixdown of the KOAS albums is going very very well and in a couple of cases some of the tracks are at the pre-mastering/test final mix stage which I’m finding quite encouraging. Much as I’ve done this kind of thing before with either a band or as a Producer/Co-Producer for friends and others, doing it with your own material is a new experience for me and one that I’ve learned a lot from and am continuing to learn. Elia and Five Years are both at a very advanced stage now, pretty much at the point where they just need final balancing/eq’ing before mastering which I’m very pleased about. Others are following close behind, like Manhattan Lullaby (although it does need a new lead vocal), The Fear Of Missing Out and No Getting Over You (both likewise) This Time and Talk To Me. Some I’ve re-done the vocals for several times and as a non-singer, finding a point that you can settle on and decide that you’ve finally captured what you’ve set out to express can be quite an elusive thing. FOMO, NGOY and Manhattan all fall into that category. They’re achievable and the guide vocals have been OK, but are some way short in my estimation and still need another big final heave to get them over the finishing line. All should be happening within the next two weeks though. The music for all of them, I’m completely happy with. Its just the vocals that are requiring of a little more work.

The whole project then, these minor jobs notwithstanding, for both London Road and No Expectations is on course for mixdown and mastering to be complete by early April with a prospective release date very shortly after that. As mentioned before, I will do my best to try and produce a very limited run of physical CD copies of both but the main release is going to be electronic.

So, as opposed to my usual thousand word ramblings, this post is quite a short one. After having moved to Warwickshire in Autumn last year, it has been a long process of getting settled in, having to concentrate on the day job and getting the studio space set up and whatever remaining tracking needed to be done for these projects, but pretty much every spare moment since the turn of the year has been spent on inching forward with this project and it is starting to bear real proper fruit, not just the low hanging stuff. The goal of this project in the first place was to put together a personal musical legacy that my late father didnt really get the chance to do, inspired by both him, my late wife and other significant people in my life and that objective is emerging out of the fog to be realised in its own right. Its taken the best part of two years tracking and mixing and learning and many, many takes and heaven knows how much editing and comping.

But, I can actually put up an album cover on social media these days with the words “Coming Soon” as a strapline and actually mean it. And for someone who started all this as a somewhat accidental bass player nearly 30 years ago, to realise a goal of releasing works that he has singularly and collaboratively written, played and produced pretty much completely in house in either a garage in Aylesbury or in a spare bedroom… Its a personal milestone and for the people who follow my efforts and my writing, plus for posterity, it is only right that I show my face above the parapet from time to time and prove that both I and the goal are still alive and breathing – and even though the day job is still the main earner, it is possible to have a personal musical dream, chase it and make it happen.

I’ve already got half an eye on the next project after this one and its hoped that some of the other tracks that are on this site will see the light of day too, maybe in more than their first iterations – Birds & Butterflies, Last Dance may get brought back to life too, plus others. We’ll see how it goes.

Meantime, thank you all for your patience. Not much longer now and all will be revealed. I promise I wont keep you waiting for much longer.