400 Lonely Things

I started recording "Creature Comforts" with 'Allegiance' on the night of November 4th, as the election results were coming in. I found myself craving lullabies, but ugly and reflective ones, that saw the world with an acute sense of horror and bewilderment and bereavement. Lullabies that didn't protect me from these feelings - or rather did protect me, but did so through immersion. I finished recording on March 10th of 2025.

Visual inspiration came from a series of mixed-media works by my gifted friend, the lovely and talented painter David Irvine, whose homely, ruggedly fragile characters appear to be comforting each other on their way to their own personal exits. With the idea that this album would be lullabies for the end of a world, I started seeking out soothing vocal samples and hypnotic audio beds and simple melodies and set about roughing them up to form a soundtrack to my perceived isolated apocalypse. These songs would be ugly on the surface, sad and angry and defeated and more than a little unhinged but, like David's paintings, hopefully have a heart that would show through the scarring. 

There's a saying along the lines of "show me a cynic and I'll show you a wounded idealist" and I needed to record this music to combat that encroaching cynicism. The songs are long and beaten up and the music just kept coming and 2.5 hours worth of recordings later, I had pushed through.