Stephen Ellis

Some songs, often the best ones, start from placing your fingers on the piano without specific intention or structure and just happening on something very small - a few notes of melody, a chord change - which instantly alights. When this happens, usually the structure required for the rest of the song becomes strangely obvious.

That was all very much the case here.

The lyrics came very quickly too - partly a song to myself in my youth, but mainly a song to my son.

This one, more than any other, really does need to be re-recorded. Mainly just needs a simple, but purposeful beat behind it, and some bass. And it'll be quite anice pop song.

Possibly one of my favourite songs. Themed around giving in to loving and being loved even when part of you is world weary and beaten and doesn't want be that vulnerable.

The transition from minor to major toward the end when the strings kick in gives me goose bumps.

I need to do more of these very open lyrical piano lines - the very opposite of block chords. Very much my attempt to do Nils Frahm type pieces, a style which I turned away from for some reason.

One of those songs which wasn't born from a dream, but was born from the place in the mind that dreams come from. An image, a character, a place, a movement. Wish I had more of these, because it's always very satisfying creating songs from them. It's one of those song ideas which would also make a good short story.

This was actually my second attempt to use these lyrics, the first was a seb_7 thing and was just too weird and discordant to be progressed. I'm please I resurrected the lyrics again here.

I knew I wanted to write a song with a consistent pattern in the right hand, made interesting with chord changes in the bass, so I basically just faffed around until evnetually this song happened. The chord changes resonated with me with from the outset, so as normally happens in that situation words start flowing pretty quickly. One of the lines that came very early on was "This song about the end of the world", which I thought was kind of ridiculous. However, I couldn't shake that line, it worked so well. So I decided to go with it. The other line which gelled and wouldn't remove itself was "So I guess you might be wondering about what might have been, with a different kind of lover". But those 2 lines didn't seem to go together at all! I also knew that I didn't want this to be a song about a break-up....

Somewhere along the way "husbandry" came into the mix and joined the 2 conflicting themes together with a sense of 'man' betraying the environmental responsibilities of stewardship bestowed upon him by God. After that I just had the rest of it to write, which took a fair while, but there was plenty to go at.

The layering of the voices was fun, but frustrating. In truth, despite my dissatisfaction with the mixing process at the studio, I couldn't have mixed those voices myself.

This song always did well at open mic and got picked up by multiple apocalypse themed playlists on Spotify. But from early on I felt that a bigger version was possible.

Like so many artists say, all the best songs they write come to them from somewhere unknown. It is a kind of magic - certainly the original inception. Many artists talk about a whole "offering from the universe" thing, which I'm always very sceptical of, but the best of what I do definitely is seeded by that kind of experience. The Truth, Lie with Me, She, this one - they all pop into existence not fully formed, but with a momentous self propelling energy, which is unmistakable when it happens.

Yet again I wonder with this song whether anyone gets the whole "husbandry" bit. The key line really is "from the birds in the air, to the fishes in the sea", which is a Genesis reference which I really don't know if anyone spots. This recording was pretty popular in Columbia though... Catholics.

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Blatant lock-down song. There's a Hungarianesque signature to this, which I just fell upon somehow. Had to record the left and right hand separately though, cos it was too hard to play otherwise!

Kind of love this one. In part because it was kind of random and I don't really know how I did it.

I wish I'd gone with a less obvious covid reference with the last couple of lines though, because it dates it so much.

This is me pondering the terrible social media experiment being performed by my generation on our kids. And all the incumbent risk of its failure. Particularly re their potential lack of developed skill at forming meaningful relationships...

Fortunately I think my worries were somewhat misplaced, and 'the kids' are doing just fine!

When the result of the Brexit referendum came in I was walking in Scotland. It felt pretty lonely up in the hills that day. I wrote this song in my head as I was walking. I remember reading an interview with Julian Cope where he said that he often wrote songs in his head while walking in the hills, and he was surprised at how simple the melody and chord structure was when he actually got home and transcribed it - that's certainly the case here, super super simple.

Always went down well at Open Mics. The political ones always did.

I used that same drumkit I built for 'Twist of Her Hips' (by sampling sounds in my kitchen), on this one.

Very much about Farage and his kin. Hate fuelled anger merchants and all round bell-ends.

An attempt to meld piano and synth with some rhythm - but not full drums... which doesn't really work in the end. Kind of confused overall.

And the song is a bit preachy, which worked quite well live cos it engaged a like minded audience, but on a recording with backing it sounds kind of disjointed I think.

One of those songs that just layers up and builds. Super easy and super fun. Playing around with euclidean rhythms is always very satisfying.

Lyrically I wanted to do a positive reflection on a post-climate-change future. I basically just grabbed a bunch of ideas and themes from a relevant copy of National Geographic, threw them together and churned them around until they worked.

This one definitiey went outside my comfort zone in terms of my singing because it's spoken word which gets uncomfortably close to rapping.

It was also a song which I knew for sure I'd never be able to do live - which was probably a first for Stephen Ellis stuff, which had always been born from doing Open Mics and things needing to feel "real" and authentic for me as a solo performer.

Also,... I was rather pleased with myself when I got the song to exactly 4 mintues...

This track is about coercion and control and how we can be oh-so willingly led by authority figures.

There was an attempt at complexity of chord playing here that I should get back to - lots of 4 notes chords in both hands. I don't attempt that any more - somewhere along the line I decided that the people I like just don't do that, so I readjusted my expectations of myself. But I need to experiment with that style of playing again.

Very much felt like a song not to be revisited or lingered on this one. Succesful in it's own way, nicely self enclosed. But I never felt the need to return to it or linger on it.

A political song masquerading as relationship psychology again (although I do sometimes wonder if the reverse is true). And another one about coercion and control - how it's easy to get swept along and complicit, just because you want a few home comforts.

Attempts to be a Goldfrapp-esque lagubrious electro-disco number.

It's a bit strained this one, a bit forced somehow. Vocally strained too. And I can hear that I feel a bit tired of the song by the time I recorded it. I'd love to be able to do this style of music, but rhythmically there's something intangible that i don't seem to be able to nail, so stuff just sounds a bit sluggish.

I re-watched BladeRunner 2049 and wrote thoughts down as I watched. Churned them around and glued them together.

I was going for a Scott Walker meets Hans Zimmer effect on this one...

Probably one of my favourite tracks actually. Bold and brazen, totally over the top in its theatre, but I think I just about pull it off. No one else likes it, but hey-ho.

A song about Alexa/Siri etc, wrapped up as a relationship song.

This one got played a lot at Open Mics. The songs stands quite easily even without the a-rhythmical loops and synth backing.

Simple. And one of the more succesful songs I think (success I'm defining in the self contained way, in terms of it meets it own goals without faultering or compromising).

Again here though, I doubt most people will see it lyrically as being anything other than a slightly weird relationship song - like some kind of S&M thing or something? Which is always annoying cos the doubt that people will know what I'm actually singing about always means I end up feeling the need to be really overt with lyrical intentions, which in turn ends up cheapening things...

Plays with the idea of a villainous character (think Trump, Farage, Musk), who potentially started off as a regular guy with ambitions but still with principles. But through a series of small, seemingly pragmatic decisions their principles fade and each small unprincipled and selfish act compounds the previous one.

That's a factor of living a life which is a risk for us all - though not to such villainous extremes perhaps.

Just a fairly simple song that came and went. Did it have drums on it, not sure, think it probably did (don't feel inclined to listen again to this one)? Which is definitely counter to what I wanted this EP to be (i.e. no drums just piano focussed singer-songwriter stuff), and is maybe why the song seems small and compromised to me - should have just gone one way or the other, full drums or no drums. Ironically, I didn't stick to my principles....

Literally a song about words and the difficulty in conjuring them when trying to write lyrics... This sense was largely born from me committing to myself (and others on Facebook), to write 4 songs while Debbie was on holiday in Vietnam - because I'd not written (m)any songs since meeting Debbie earlier in the year.

I love the poem at the end of this song. A poem that came into my head very quickly and impromptly while showering off a hangover after a sleepless night in the early months of ending my marriage. Twas a tumultuous time... my sense of confusion fuelled by massively disastrous attempts within the world of online-dating. Ironically, this poem was an exact expression of the opposite experience of what the song was about! It's the kind of thing that only presents itself when you're feeling kind of broken. Too much booze and not enough sleep undoutedly create fissures in the mind through which this stuff erupts. The rest of the lyric feels kind of forced as I read it, but to other people it still seems authentic I think, so that's fine.

It's a simple piano part, but still kind of pretty, in a poppy kind of way. I kind of like how I wrote parts back then - like I didn't know what I was doing, because I didn't. I still don't, but back then I really didn't.