And finally we've completely finished some songs!!! It's been a brilliant journey so far and since the last blog, so much has happened. Neil was home for a few weeks and we got some excellent recording sessions done and a bit of boozing, obviously!! Some of the songs sound so different now, far better than I was expecting so I suppose taking our time has really paid off!

The final piece of the jigsaw was always going to be the sticky part, with all the music done it's all down to the vocals. The idea was to have male and female vocals in the songs as the songs are telling stories that need that dynamic. Hannah came into the studio in January and since we'd never had female vocals before we weren't sure if it would work at all. Well it didn't take long to find out, we chatted about some of the songs and we recorded her on part of the song "Won't let you down". Hannah left the studio and myself and Dave just sat there and looked at each other without saying a word. I think we both had a realization about what we just heard. Dave was just smiling because, since he's the producer he knows her voice is just perfect, not just for this song but she'd probably sound amazing on all of them!!

I'm smiling too but for different reasons, yip she sounds brilliant but the problem is she's kinda too good to just do backing vocals, she'd have to be a main vocalist!! Yeah, that means I'd have to slightly change the view point from which the songs were written, I won't have to completely re-write them but I'll definitely have to think of them from a different angle. Two problems with this, firstly it means finishing the songs is going to take longer again and secondly, will she even want to do main vocals on the songs??? Now that we know how good she sounds and the extra dynamic the female vocal adds, it just wouldn't sound the same without her!

A few sessions later and everything just sounds better and better, we're getting through the songs one by one and paying particular attention to harmonies and cross harmonies and as many melodies as possible. I've never enjoyed writing as much, it's all coming to life at long last. Hannah is the now the main vocalist and myself and Neil are adding backing vocals in most songs, the dynamic is just perfect. This whole thing is a million miles away from what I was planning to do at the start, the idea of just me and my acoustic doing a solo album is a distant memory! So now we actually have some songs ready, we're deciding which ones to release first. Our plan is to do a promo video, Peter has a lot of video footage of us in the studio so we're going to take snippets of some of the songs and put them with the footage. We're then going to properly release a song or two then follow it up with the release of the full album!!! I can't wait.. after all the effort and hard work the finishing line is in sight... Tunes are on the way!!!!