As the title track of the album, it shouldnt be too surprising that the theme of change behind this song runs throughout the course of the entire record. It was written on a bus journey back from college one evening, where I was thinking about my overly routine lifestyle and this urge I had to shake things up, be someone new and do something completely different for once. Funnily enough, now I know that no matter how you dress up your life, you're always going to be the same old person.

I don't think any song on the album has changed so much as Transit. This simple little tune started off as something more akin to a dance track, with a casio-esque drum loop and a single guitar played alongside my voice. During recording, this was transformed into a much grander composition with guitars, strings, and some very apt sound effects taken from trainyards and signal crossings.

Warchibeser is one of the more poppy and silly tracks on the album, being about... well... the effects of alcohol essentially.

Back from a night out on the tiles (as they say in Essex and most other third world counties) I was chatting with an old buddy of mine online and somehow through a flurry of poorly tapped key presses, the word Warchibeser was born. The next day I was reminded of my fantastic new word, and we concluded that I was actually trying to say "Archers". He then dared me to write a song about it. So, upto the challenge, I dashed to my keyboard and began to write this song. Surprisingly, it actually turned out to be pretty good, and so it became a frequent song in my live sets and eventually ended up on the record. Lets drink to that.

With 'love' (and particularly heartbreak) being an easy inspiration for most artists, it surprisingly took me six years to come up with a real heartfelt song on the subject, but then its not something I had experienced before.

This has become one of my favourite songs to perform, purely because of the emotion involved.

Winter Rain is a very important track to me in that it was the first song I wrote that actually struck a chord (tch-boom) with people, prompting appearances on the radio and bookings for my first ever live gigs.

I had just begun to sing in public a month or two prior and was asked to come up with something for a charity concert at school. I decided to try out one of my own songs though I had only written four at the time and they were all a bit naff, full of clichéd soppyness. I had a good feeling about a catchy new song that I had just started writing, and so I finished it quickly for the concert ready to debut to a hall full of classmates on the night. To my surprise it got a terrific response, and Winter Rain became my first successful song.

The most difficult thing about releasing an album consisting of songs written over such a long period of time is that inevitably, some songs will end up becoming a bore to perform live. So much material has been replaced along the way with songs that sound fresher to me, but this never happened with Winter Rain. It has been changed a fair bit over the years, but today it still remains as a tune i'm proud of, and continues to be played in all my live sets.

Blood on the Line surfaced midway through my first year at university. It was written about how I was feeling at the time, that I would rather be playing or writing music than churning out lots of stupid maths equations or learning the intricate details of ancient computer processors. It was also the very first song I wrote in 3/4 time.

This track has a very theatrical feel to it, and is one of the grander compositions on the album.

Childhood Flame came about in school while I was considering my options for university. At 17 I didn't have a great deal of confidence and I wasnt even sure I wanted to leave my 'comfort zone' at home and go live in some strange new place for three years... the very thought scared the living hell out of me. So this song was essentially written about my fears of growing up and moving out.

This was recorded many times in demo form over the years, but never got to be played live until recently. It's reception and positive feedback made it an obvious choice for the album.

With its low-key instrumentation, this track is very atmospheric where the focus is more on the voice and the lyrics than the instruments.

Troglodyte was the first song to be written after arriving at university. It's a jaunty feel-good kinda song with lyrics that carry a sort of bitter and demented bent, which makes it a lot of fun to perform.

This was another song written during my time at school, although it sounded much different back then. The chorus was completely different, and its first performance was with a complete band at a small concert evening for faculty and parents. Since then its changed quite a bit.

At first I didn't actually realize how popular this song could be... infact, it was next in line to be replaced on the album. It's only thanks to the reaction its gotten at gigs and online that I decided to give this old track a makeover and try it out on a fresh audience. It paid off, and Confusion has become a great addition to the album.

I had the title of this song in my head for a while before I actually decided to do anything with it. When the deadline came for my creative music coursework I needed a piece of music to submit, so I wrote and recorded the initial demo of this in a single weekend. The result was something very different from anything else i'd done, and a positive response led me to record it for the album.

The lyrics have a sort of religious undertone to them, speaking of a people who have apparently run out of options who turn to god in a last act of desparation.

The bizarre middle 8 section (which sounds a bit like children laughing on helium apparently) was actually the vocal talent of my housemate. I asked her to "argue with" the microphone and she came up with a very strange rant about liking ducks, geese and lakes. Given a lot of echo and spliced with some more ambient noise... voila! Insanity was born.

Firelight stands out as being the most upbeat track on the album, using dance loops, synth, bells and a driving piano riff thats both cheery and frantic. Standing in at seven minutes long, it's also the track thats been the most difficult to work with structurally. Many times i've tried to cut it down by losing a verse or severely shortening the ending, but it just didnt sound right... in the end I decided a seven minute dance track perhaps wasnt such a bad idea after all.

Sometimes when i'm writing lyrics, I try to avoid thinking too much on a single topic, and focus more on the imagery that comes from my general state of mind. As a result, my worries and fears can sometimes reveal themselves on paper without me even realizing it. This was the case with Firelight, as it dealt with a problem I had been having for a few months prior to the writing of this song; writers block. Lyrically, Firelight is one of the songs i'm most proud of.

Selecting the final track for the album was a surprisingly difficult task. I knew that I wanted the record to end on a poignant note, but with six years worth of material to choose from it was a pretty tough choice. In the end I chose For A Lifetime, a song written at the start of 2007.

While it's a song i'm very proud of, i've always backed away from it because of it's simplicity. Without the bells and whistles of the other tracks, For A Lifetime is more akin to a poem sung against a gentle backdrop of guitar than a grander piece of music.