Secure the Colour consists of songs that were written by me between the years of 2011-2014, and recorded in March 2021. They are songs about love and war that directly connect to both my personal feelings at the time of writing, and also tell a wider, fictionalised story I was writing. Time will tell if these are the final versions or not.

I have revisited them this year for several reasons.

Firstly, I’ve found it is important to get songs out of my head and recorded in some way in order to make room for new ones. As I move further away from who I was when I wrote them, I find myself less connected to the more personal lyrics (Matchless My Mount) and crucially, less able to perform them (Oil on the Road) as I once did. However, I do not want to abandon them altogether. Even though I have not made them into the bombastic, full-band ideas I once imagined, I think it’s important that they still exist here. I hope it doesn’t take me 10 years next time.

Secondly, I am revisiting the aforementioned fictional story they are based around, this time as a piece of creative writing. Finally co-writing the first draft of a novel about it with a friend of mine last year, I was inspired to immerse myself in all of the material that he and I put together during those early conceptual years, and remembering how to play these songs has given me a new dimension by which to understand the story.

Thirdly, this represents another step towards more DIY-recorded music. I’ve been recording and producing my own music for years due to lack of budget, but the last few years has been a conscious choice. I love the control over the process, and I am growing my understanding of ‘music-as-diary’ – using music as a way to tell myself and others where I am in my life. There is no escaping what difficulties lockdown brings to everyone, musicians included. To that end, I have left the sounds of my dog, the sounds of phone calls and noisy neighbours, and of cars passing in the recordings. You might also notice the sound of my wedding band slapping against my guitar, something else that has changed for me in the past year.



Tl;Dr - a small DIY acoustic/folk/punk record, a fictional story of love and war made during lockdown in my flat. For fans of: The Dear Hunter, The Mountain Goats, Jeff Rosenstock, The Front Bottoms.