An Overview of my Compositions to Date

Thanks for Having Me

This is one of the first songs I could say I composed. It is also one of the few songs that I am still content with, often finding that, in revisiting my compositions over time, I become more dissatisfied with that recorded version of the song, and think about what more could have done to improve it. However with this song, perhaps for reasons of sentimentality, I remain surprisingly quite satisfied and it seems as though I can yet enjoy it as a piece of music.

The title came to me after a trip to the Isle of Man, staying at a friend's place, and though I had been working on the song and had almost completed it at the time, the name just felt very appropriate for the mood of the song.

The Rains in Old Times

Like the song before, I would say that this is one of a few of my compositions that I am still satisfied with, and for similar reasons. As a result of not being so focused on its defects, it seems I am just able to listen to and play this song as though it were not mine, which makes it all the more enjoyable for me.

If I were being pretentious, which I am, I would say the motivation for the name of the composition, and the feeling that it's meant to evoke is a sense of tension and inevitability, or specifically the feeling I remember before and during summer storms in my childhood memories.

Don't Tell Me

This track is a bit of an anomaly. From all of the compositions on this list, this is probably one of the oldest, in that it is something I have been working on, on-and-off, for a long time. There are many different incarnations of this one composition, and I'm not sure I consider this recording to be the definitive one, whereas in most cases, the recording that gets uploaded to SoundCloud (or Spotify) represents the definitive version for my purposes. Various other versions of this piece include lyrics, drums and synths etc, but this recording, and all of those other versions feel like covers of an as-yet-unrecorded "true" version of this composition. `

Hold Out for Hesitation

When writing this piece, the melody and the way that the parts played by the left and right hands contrasted almost reminded me of an argument or debate, one of the ones where you're absorbed in, kind of what I imagine Socrates is describing when he talks about the dialectic, though I'm sure this isn't what he had in mind.

Send it Spinning

I'm not 100% on the name for this composition. I remember struggling, at one point I wanted to call it "Time's Eye", before realising that it's the name of a novel by Athur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter, which I should have at least read before naming my song the same thing. The song, I feel, is supposed to feel a little fantastical, and evoke feelings of destiny and magic and the like.

Under the Sun

I'm a little embarrased by this one, since I am singing here. That being said, I think if I could find a singer who would take these lyrics and do something better with them, I would be more than happy to record an improved version.

Cosimo's Dream

I come back to this one regularly. It's a composition that I love to improvise over and over again, and it's surprisingly versatile, and I still play many different versions of it. Because of this, it suffers from the same "not the definitive version of the song" thing that "Don't Tell Me" has. The title actually refers to the name of the protagonist of a story by Italo Calvino that I had recently read at the time of recording this song. The book was called "The Baron in the Trees", and it starts with Cosimo as a child who climbs up into a tree in the family's garden one day and refuses to come down.

Killing Houseplants

This is one of the compositions that I look back on and find myself very dissatisfied in many different ways. The name, like many of my other songs, was an afterthought, and attempt to label the feeling of a song, but I think it has failed in this regard, and whereas some of my other songs have grown to fit their names in time, this one never has. It is also a shame in that I think I could have done a lot more with it musically, the central melodies of the composition are strong, but they are not sufficiently developed, and at no point does it feel like it departs into anything more interesting, it just remains alternating between to rather pleasing concepts. I think I'll let it remain a reminder to myself that, musically, I can't just focus on the things that please me.