I dusted off some of my old tracks from 1997 and added
some new ones in this my first home produced album.
Spotify Samples
ALBUM OVERVIEW
Folk Music (Vol 1) is a collection of ten songs that asks what it truly means to be an ordinary person living an ordinary life, and quietly questions whether “ordinary” is really the right word at all.
The album, a collection of new and old songs, gathers ten separate portraits, of the self, of love, of friendship, of home, of wisdom passed down, of a stranger glimpsed once and never forgotten, and lets them sit side by side. Each song stands entirely on its own, but taken together they build something closer to a group photograph: a way of looking at what makes a life, examined from many different angles at once.
The songs move between the intimate and the universal. Some look inward, questioning identity and memory. Others look outward, toward the people who make a life worth living, a partner, a friend, a stranger with a story to tell. What connects them is a quiet insistence that ordinary lives are not small lives. The bartender, the sailor, the old man on the street corner, the child who once ran barefoot through a field, all of them carry something worth noticing, if only someone stops to look.
The album begins by asking who we really are. It ends by discovering who someone else turned out to be.
An summary overview of each of the tracks on the album
1. An Ordinary Man (2025)
The album opens with a question posed directly to the listener: when you look at me, who do you see? What follows is not a single answer but many, friend, lover, singer, poet, rebel, scholar, gambler, cynic. Rather than resolving into one identity, the song embraces contradiction, arriving at a simple conclusion: you don't need fit a mould, to be seen as one thing when the reality is you are a combination of many.
2. Next To You (2025)
A love song built on stillness rather than spectacle. There are no fireworks or grand declarations here, only slow mornings, quiet smiles, and the plain comfort of someone choosing to stay close. It is a portrait of love stripped of performance, content simply to exist beside another person where talking feels as natural as breathing.
3. A Life With No Regrets (2025)
Told through faded photographs pulled from beneath a bed, the song traces one man’s life from boyhood to old age, school, marriage, children, the calm and the storm, always returning to a single piece of advice passed down from his father: live a life with no regrets. By the song’s end, that inherited advice has become his own, passed in turn to his children.
4. Take My Hand (2025)
A song about friendship as the truest form of wealth. Gold and diamonds are set aside in favour of something harder to measure but far more valuable, companionship, offered freely and returned in kind. Walking side by side becomes its own reward, richer with every step taken together.
5. Somewhere I Belong (2025)
A restless song about the search for home, not a place on a map, but a feeling that has proven elusive despite years of trying on new towns, new jobs, new versions of a life. The bridge offers a quiet turn: perhaps belonging was never about geography at all, but about the presence of one person who is looking for the same and willing to hold on through the hard parts to reach a destination together.
6. The River Knows My Name (2025)
Born in the mountains and shaped by a life of fleeting loves and heavy loads, this song returns again and again to one constant: a river that has borne witness to everything, the river itself a symbol for the journey through life. And while people, towns, and even memories shift and fade, the river remains, a quiet, steady keeper, even at the very end.
7. Said The Blindman (1999)
A parable disguised as a folk song. A blind man asks his friend to describe the colour red, and the answer unfolds into a meditation on the whole of human experience, birth, love, war, pain, anger, beauty, all held within a single colour. At heart, it is a song about empathy: the effort, and the grace, of trying to help someone else see the world as we do, and realising that in the end they already do.
8. Live For Today (1998)
The album’s most direct address to the listener, part anthem, part gentle sermon. Be a maker, not a breaker. Be a friend, not a stranger. Speak up rather than stay silent especially for those that can't speak up for themselves. Beneath its plainspoken instructions is a simple urgency: the recognition that today, not tomorrow, is the only time we actually have and we need to embrace each day fully.
9. The Kid I Use To Be (2025)
A conversation across time, addressed to a childhood self who once built houses in treetops and sailed rafts to distant shores. Bills, deadlines, and sleepless nights have taken their place, but the song refuses to let that child go entirely, hoping instead that he might still recognise, and still believe in, the person his older self has become. That same child, that early dreamer, is still in all of us.
10. The Ballad of John Doe (1997)
The album closes with a nameless stranger, an old man sheltering from the rain, a bottle in his hand, seemingly with nothing. But as his story unfolds, it reveals a life every bit as vast as anyone’s: a sailor, a soldier, a witness to history, a man who walked the Great Wall of China and watched the first steps on the moon. The song is about not judging a book by it's cover, everyone has value, everyone has a story to tell.
What began as ten unconnected songs gradually revealed a shared preoccupation: the gap between how ordinary a life looks from the outside and how vast it actually is from within.
Folk Music (Vol 1) does not follow one person through one story. Instead, it moves between an ordinary man taking stock of himself, a couple settling into quiet love, a son inheriting his father’s advice, two friends walking a shared road, a wanderer looking for home, a river holding steady while a life changes around it, a blind man learning to see through another’s words, a voice urging others to live with purpose, a grown man reaching back for the child he used to be, and finally, a stranger whose whole life is revealed only after it has ended.
Individually, each song is a small, self-contained portrait. Together, they argue for something larger: that no life is small once you actually look at it closely enough. The “ordinary man” of the opening track and John Doe of the closing one turn out to be the same kind of person, overlooked, easy to walk past, and yet, on closer inspection, carrying an entire world inside them.
Nobody is really ordinary.
The album cover art is titled "The World Within". The profile of the ordinary man contains an entire landscape of memories, relationships, dreams, and experiences, representing the album’s central idea that every seemingly ordinary person carries a world within them.
It reflects An Ordinary Man, where a single person is revealed to contain many different identities, and A Life With No Regrets, where photographs and memories trace the journey from childhood through family and into old age. The father and child walking together echo The Kid I Used To Be, connecting the man he has become with the child and dreams that still remain part of him, while the compass, old photograph, distant roads, and solitary figure looking across the water evoke The Ballad of John Doe, whose outwardly unremarkable appearance conceals a lifetime of extraordinary experiences.
The lovers, musician, river, city, and distant home bring the album’s wider stories together, symbolising love, friendship, belonging, memory, and the passage of time. By placing all of these experiences within the silhouette of one man, the image captures the album’s central belief: nobody is truly ordinary; every person carries an entire world within them, if only we take the time to look closely enough.
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