I dusted off some of my old tracks from 2001 and added
some new ones in this my second home produced album.
Spotify Samples
ALBUM OVERVIEW
Folk Music (Vol 2) is a collection of ten songs about the different shapes that constraint takes in a modern life, and the equally varied ways people find to answer it: with love, with friendship, with protest, with simply slowing down long enough to notice what matters.
This album looks outward, at the systems, routines, and forces that press against a life from the outside. The rat race of the nine-to-five. The slow erosion of rights dressed up as law and order. The restless churn of new technology. The corrosive theatre of a corrupted politics. Set against all of this are the album's quieter answers: a friendship that asks for nothing and gives everything, a love that holds through any storm, an old man who still tips his hat to the morning despite it all.
The album doesn't pretend these pressures can simply be wished away. Instead, it argues for a kind of stubborn resilience, chained, perhaps, by circumstance, by history, or by time itself, but never fully broken by any of it.
It begins by asking whether you will ever break free of the routine.
It ends with something like an answer, not freedom exactly, but peace with what remains. Everything in between is the journey to get there.
An summary overview of each of the tracks on the album
1. A Day In The Life Of (2025)
The album opens inside the routine itself, the alarm, the commute, the fogged-over bus window, the hum of an office that has nothing left to say. It is a plainspoken portrait of a life measured out in identical days, gently but insistently asking whether this was ever really the plan and if not are you going to break the chains that bind you.
2. Between Two Stars (2025)
A wanderer stands beneath the night sky, torn between two pulls, the star of home, memory, and everything familiar, and the star of tomorrow, with all its uncertain promise. Rather than resolving the tension, the song settles into it, finding meaning not in choosing one direction but in learning to live suspended between both.
3. Chained But Unbroken (2026)
A protest song built from a litany of everyday injustices, rent that rises faster than wages, courts whose fairness shifts with the wind, rights fought for but never fully secured, gender inequality and same sex relationships. Its refrain insists that none of this silences the people it is aimed at: chained by circumstance, perhaps, but never broken by it.
4. Lanterns In The Rain (2025)
A love song set against riverbanks, temple bells, and drifting lantern light. Woven from images of rain, market nights, and quiet devotion, it describes a love steady enough to keep glowing through any storm, soft where the world outside is loud. A song that came about after a work colleagues son recorded himself playing the tabla (Indian drum) to one of my previous tracks.
5. Slowdown (1998)
A gently teasing sermon against the rush of modern life. The song points out the absurdity of searching so hard for something you can't even name, and offers a simple corrective: stop running in circles, find someone to love, and slow down long enough to actually touch another person's life.
6. Swings & Roundabouts (2026)
History repeats itself here in miniature, walls built and torn down, laws rewritten while the underlying game stays the same, wealth quietly rolling uphill generation after generation. The song's outro breaks from its own resignation, insisting that the cycle only continues if people do nothing and allow it to continue.
7. The Digital Tide (2025)
A meditation on technology moving faster than the people it displaces. Jobs dissolve into data, purpose and progress blur together, and the song's growing unease peaks with a genuinely unsettling thought: what happens when the intelligence we've built starts developing something like a mind of its own?
8. The Felons Crown (2026)
The album's most explicitly political song, telling the story of a convicted man crowned as leader anyway, the Constitution sworn to and then torn up, judges silenced, the press pushed aside. It is a warning dressed as a ballad, though its final verse insists that the people's voice, however diminished, is never permanently gone.
9. The Quiet Love (2025)
A tribute to old friendship, the kind that survives silence, distance, and long unanswered messages, without ever needing grand declarations to prove itself. It argues that the deepest love isn't always the loudest; often it's simply the friend who shows up, unannounced, regardless of the time between, like nothing ever changed.
10. The Years Roll By (2025)
The album closes with an old man walking a little slower than he used to, tallying the places he's been and the fire he still has left. Time, the song insists, doesn't bargain or explain itself, it simply carries everyone beneath the same sky. And yet the song ends not in despair but in gratitude, raising a glass to the friends still walking alongside him.
What began as a set of songs about very different pressures, a job, a government, a screen, a clock, gradually revealed a single underlying question: how does a person stay whole while so many forces, large and small, try to shape them from the outside?
Folk Music (Vol 2) never argues that these pressures can be escaped outright. The commute still runs on Monday. History still tends to repeat itself. Technology still moves faster than anyone asked it to. Power still occasionally crowns the wrong people. But alongside each of these, the album places something that quietly resists them, a friendship that costs nothing and means everything, a love that holds through the rain, an old man who still finds reasons to raise his glass.
The album's structure mirrors its subject. It opens with a life boxed in by routine, and closes with a life that has made a kind of peace with time itself, not because the chains disappeared, but because something in the person wearing them never broke.
The album's closing image, an old man, weathered but unbowed, still walking forward, is also its central belief.
Being chained by circumstance is not the same as being broken by it.
The album cover art is titled "The Unbroken Link". The chain represents the forces that shape and restrict modern life: routine, inequality, politics, technology, history, and time. But the central link remains unbroken, and from within it, life continues to grow.
It reflects the struggle of A Day In The Life Of, where routine becomes its own kind of chain, and Chained But Unbroken, whose central message is that hardship and injustice can constrain people without defeating them. The persistent growth echoes Slowdown, with its reminder that love and human connection can still flourish amid the pressures of modern life, while the weathered but enduring chain looks toward The Years Roll By, where age and time leave their marks without extinguishing gratitude or the will to keep moving forward.
The roots, flowers, and young tree bring these ideas together, symbolising love, friendship, courage, and resilience, the quieter forces that help a person remain whole even when circumstances cannot be escaped. The image captures the album’s central belief: being chained by the world is not the same as being broken by it.
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