Making an EP – Our Mate John

This five track EP was released in 2015, and as part of a series of blogs I’m pulling together I thought it might be fun to talk about how it was completed.  I will try in some other blogs to go into some of the individual songs but I’ll try and stick with the overall EP for this post.

There’s five tracks on it and it began when a friend of mine Nick Jonah Davies asked if I had some songs that he could use to practice his recording techniques.  It’s the type of offer that every singer-songwriter wants; free recording time!  We focussed on two tracks ‘Our Mate Pete’ and ‘I Hear’.  I’d written these songs years before but they seemed to fit together.  Nick did a great job and brought so much more to the recordings than I could every have done.  So, it turned out I had two great tracks but no others.

My brother, Kris Wright lived in Leeds at the time and primarily played jazz, though to be honest like most people who play jazz to a competent degree; could play anything.  With far more wisdom and skill than I had, he offered to help with some recording up in’t Leeds.  This time it would need paying for, but the sweetener was my brother’s link to other musicians and his offer of writing string quartet scores.

So off up to Leeds I trundled where we recorded four songs, Growing Up, POETS Day, Losing Streak & Caravans.

I now had enough tunes to release an EP, but they’d been recorded using different equipment and people.  At the time my brother likened it to painting a house; ‘you can paint the lot white, but if the brands of paint are different you will see the joins’.  Much gnawing of teeth but again my good fortune was other people; Pete Fletcher.  Pete was a friend of Nick’s and our paths had crossed a couple of times in Nottingham, but Pete had a studio and offered mastering.  The only note I gave was make all the drums sound like they do on ‘Our Mate Pete’ and he did the rest.

I ended up with my first EP, of which I am still enormously proud.  It is unusual to produce something that says exactly what you want it to, and I feel it continues to do that.  The songs collectively take the listener on a story through my past, some of it made up, some of it out of context, sometimes both, sometimes neither.  I wrote ‘Growing Up’ specifically to sit alongside this collection of songs as I felt there needed to be a tune that specifically drew it all together into the narrative of my past.  I always thought it was the weakest song, but then it came out as the strongest recording, go figure.

N.B. for those fastidious with numbers you may have noticed an anomaly in the number of songs listed and the number on the EP.  The answer is that Caravans never made the cut, but more about that song another time.

Listen to Our Mate John EP – Spotify