The Making Of

This music started life as a year-long endeavour previously dubbed The Year Of Gear.  In January, I began writing songs based around my love of vintage effects pedals and released the footage of them being recorded in real time on YouTube on the 1st of every month. But as is so often the case with these sorts of things, the project quickly began to evolve into a body of work deserving of a far more concrete title and official release.

All of the tracks have been remixed and remastered from their original YouTube versions and consist entirely of complete ‘takes’ of real guitar playing (no audio edits going on around here, thank you!).

As 2017 progressed, I realised I was approaching the ‘Year Of Gear’ songs with as much consideration to their running order and flow for the YouTube playlist as I was to writing standalone tracks – essentially, I was recording an album but hadn’t quite realised!  There are certainly themes and ideas pinning everything together that I’m only really aware of now it’s done.  In terms of my songwriting, I think this is my most accessible and honest record to date too – I think I’ve been focusing less on storytelling and much more on things that might be personal to me this particular year. An organic-sounding album cooked up in my new home studio, I Live On The Outside has a sound born of the old-school recording traditions and is an entirely one-man-against-the-world affair – everything from the writing & engineering through to mixing, mastering and release was tackled in-house.