Alone, Not Alone, my latest album, is a collection of musings on solitude and togetherness. There is a strange juxtaposition in my life at the moment; some days are brimming with chaos with all the to-ing and fro-ing of family life with young children, and other day’s are spent entirely alone in the studio or on the road to gigs. Learning to live in these extremes of being alone/not alone interested me, amongst other questions of whether we are alone in this life and this became the theme to the album.

In the summer of 2018, I was inspired by a visit to a peninsula in Western France, where there was a huge variety of landscape within a small geographical area. I wondered how this could be conveyed musically and began to experiment with the idea of creating variety and texture within a limited area. This project has been forming over the last three years and during this time, our own group of islands (the UK), has been going through a real time of questioning our identity as island people, where we belong and wrestling with ideas of solitude and togetherness.

I wanted to explore a slower and more playful approach to creating an album this time around. I set out to write each track sequentially, not beginning the next until the previous one had been fully explored. This gave a directional flow to the song writing and allowed a narrative to emerge. Having more time and space in the recording process allowed a much greater freedom for me. I followed several threads that didn’t end up being on the album as its shape began to emerge. It was liberating to be able to shelve ideas and carry others forward in exploration, without feeling a time pressure to finish but to allow the album to arrive in its own time.

My hope is that these 51 minutes and 14 seconds or so of musings of solitude and togetherness will allow the listener space to ponder these questions for themselves.

Many thanks for listening, Joel x