Introducing…The Disappointed Skeptics Club

And now for a musical interlude…

If you’ve been following this site over the last couple of years you might have spotted that I’ve been doing a thing called FAWM (February Album Writing Month – think NaNoWriMo but for music) for the last few years. The aim of FAWM is to spend February writing at least fourteen songs, which I’ve managed fairly successfully. What you’re supposed to do next is buff those songs up real nice and release them as an album…and I’ve not done so well on that score. Recording is time consuming and finicky. Producing what you’ve recorded into something listenable is a hundred times finickier and more time consuming. And in the past, I’ve just not had the time and focus to get the work done.

Until this year, and the Great Lacuna of COVID-19.

So now I’m pleased to be able to present The Disappointed Skeptics Club. Eight tracks selected from my FAWM 2020 writing stint (and one from FAWM 2019), and my first new music release since the last murnie, EP, Sundaymouth in…gasp…2012.

So what is The Disappointed Skeptics Club about? In short, it’s about ghosts. It’s about finding the supernatural in the world no matter how matter hard you try not to believe in it. Each of the songs feature ghosts in some form. Some are sad ghosts, some are whimsical, one is a little scary, one is embittered and several are properly silly. There are no real ghosts in these songs (or are there?), but there is a real person – Jessie J Jeffrey, who lived in this house at the start of the 20th century, and who I like to think of as a presence here.

And the songs feature ghosts in another way too: each of the songs was written thinking about the styles that have influenced me over the years, from the great piano singer songwriters to 80s synth pop to dixieland jazz. Which means is no two of these songs are alike, except for a certain amount of retro and a deep love for the Wurlitzer EP. Oddly, I wasn’t inspired to invoke the NWOBHM period of my first band…maybe next year.

If you’re at all interested, you can find the album over at bandcamp.