There’s a theme that runs through a lot of the songs on this album: the power of the few over the many. Here’s just a sample:

Free-market lotto, it might happen to you

One person wins while millions have to lose.

And while the masters sit on high

The people fight to stay alive

But kings and queens cannot be blamed

It’s only numbers that decide

The great man he walks upon the stage

The little men are all dancing in his cage

That last one is from “Read My Mind.” This song has many threads, but it opens with a…

It’s crazy that we call this time that we live in the information age. Sure, we have a lot of information, but a lot of it is garbage. And staying on top of what’s going on certainly doesn’t make you better off. I’d love to say that this was written from a knowing place of appropriate information-distance, but the truth is, I was once like Phil in the song- “an information-junkie and a cable-news whore.” I was plugged in to what was happening, and I was getting the talking points. I knew what was what. Or…

This song has a lot of layers- both lyrically and musically. I was playing the music on the guitar and thought, “This should be a song.” No plan, just some music. Sometimes I write place-holder lyrics when I want to remember the rhythm of the melody, so I began in that vein. Something about that first line captivated me, and when I got to the second line, I knew I wasn’t writing placeholder lyrics. I wasn’t writing so much as channelling from a very deep source. Something knew what to write, if I didn’t…

In the UK, the government is addressing the scourge of loneliness head-on with several initiatives. Loneliness shortens lives by making them less fun, so it makes sense that the government might step in. It’s odd that we might experience a loneliness epidemic given that there are more people on the planet than ever before, and we are all hyper-connected to one another. You’d think we’d have the opposite problem: a lack of privacy epidemic. But of course, our screens don’t bring us closer together.

But even…