Alterations began life as a kneejerk reaction. I'd been pondering how to follow up Ascendant - very much a late-night atmospheric mood piece - and felt determined not to be pigeonholed as a slow angsty indie neo-classicist, because that was only one aspect of the work I wanted to create. There were a handful of mostly uptempo songs I wanted to record, but randomly writing another bunch and slinging the whole lot together in a vaguely acceptable order didn't seem like that interesting a prospect (I like albums with a sense of purpose, after all). Not only that, but I did want there to be SOME connection with the previous album lest it appear like a musical invasion of the body-snatchers type affair.

A band performing a song live can make for a euphoric communal experience for all present, and few would deny the power of the irreproducible moment. But then clubbing can also create euphoric irreproducible moments. Is clubbing less 'real'? Is listening to music through headphones less 'real', when the environment around you can actively alter your perception of what you are listening to?

Not everything that is good can be done in real time without using pre-programmed or pre-recorded elements, and there can be just as much artistry and hard work in studio creations. I enjoy performing live, but logistics and cost mean it will never have the richness of the recorded version in terms of, say, string players or range of vocalists.

As for the title... Well, there are many songs out there which take some well-used everyday phrase and apply it to a song setting, with the familiarity of the words piquing curiosity and ensuring some level of memorability. I wasn't aware that this particular phrase had had a musical outing, so off I jolly well rode with it. The Pet Shop Boys are so good at this (eg What Have I Done To Deserve This?, Do I Have To?, Bet She's Not Your Girlfriend, You Know Where You Went Wrong) that I figured they may as well get a namecheck as reward, even if I had to reverse their usual writing credit of Tennant-Lowe in order to squeeze it in. Their sadly overlooked Miserabilism from the B-side collection Alternative is also referred to.

Musically it is all very radio-friendly acoustic stuff, but it does also veer strangely toward country in some respects. This wasn't the intention when it was written, but the ultra-simple bass guitar line in the final set of choruses led it that way, and so the slide guitar in the instrumental then seemed a logical extension. All that said, it's not exactly Dolly Parton.

Lyrically... Well, it's linked to Headlonging in that they are both songs about life spinning out of control. But whereas the former is an instinctive and personal response, TUSCB casts its view rather more widely on the 21st century.

The title is a clue, obviously. Whilst I accept that on the whole human beings are resourceful, adaptable and generally able to make the best of a bad situation, we really have painted ourselves into a corner lately, haven't we? There's the ongoing financial shit (mind-boggling and unpayable private debts offloaded on to ordinary people while the super-rich and associated global corporations make full use of tax havens and buy both the media and mainstream political class), short to medium term shit (resource depletion: oil in particular, that most taken for granted of substances and war-provoker supreme) and medium to long term shit (climate change, likely to lead to crop failure and water shortages well before the significant sea level rise everyone automatically first consders).

It's all a little despairing, admittedly, but in the same way that comedy can provide catharsis regarding dreadful subjects, I think music can do the same. It's not meant to inspire apathy, but rather galvanise the listener into action. The old saying about 'evil triumphing when the good do nothing' has never been more true.

Small steps, people, small steps. Never give up.

Paradise By Numbers was the last song to be written for the album. In fact, I'd barely finished the main body of it before recording the demos, and the coda was most definitely unfinished at that point. This was not for want of trying: it just proved quite reluctant to fall into shape. Perhaps as a consequence of the sweat and toil that went into it, I'm particularly proud of this one!

Similarly, finding a suitable vocalist proved quite a task; I tried it out with a number of vocalists before getting the right fit, unlike most of the other songs on this album (or Ascendant, for that matter). In the end, Rob Hodkinson, who has not sung on any of my tracks before, did the recording session having never before rehearsed it with me present. I was stunned by the vigour and quality of his performance.

As if that weren't enough, the extended coda then has string parts quoting melodies from YDNMTTYT in their more recognisable forward direction, as well as the verse melody from PBN at a much slower speed. These sit alongside the repeated first lines of the PBN chorus (using the third line of the YDNMTTYT chorus in reverse, as explained above) which become a canon of sorts, each part overlapping with those either side.

Phew. Now you can probably understand why this one took me a while to get right... :)

The five notes in question are those sung with the lines 'Some songs know it all' and 'Some songs tell such lies': E, Eb, D, B, C. The recurring melody introduced by the piano in the slow opening section here, and subsequently played by both the violin and piano accordion, was built around these notes by simply lingering on them more than the others. (For the real musical pedants out there, the immediate repeat of the theme also deliberately avoids repeating any notes in its second half, but hey... You picked that up, right?)

Echoes of the initial theme are used in the Em sections where Bryony's vocal first arrive ('Silver the light on the water' etc) but then in the return to Am where the crowd first sing ('Aurora ahhh, your wonder does deceive...') the theme is inverted into an answering phrase so that it works upwards in an almost exact mirror of the original. One further weaving of melody to note is Bryony's Em theme appearing in the final Am section after the recap of the slow intro. 

The piece is also heavily influenced by my work as a dance class pianist, which often calls for adaptability and a whole variety of styles and moods far beyond the simple classical ballet stereotype. There is a definite Spanish element at work here beyond the obvious bits of that language (translated by the ever helpful and groovy Kate Whitehouse, who also translated the French and Spanish lyrics in THE DEATH OF COPYRIGHT). The harmonic progression of the vigorous handclap sections and expertly played flamenco guitar running throughout certainly give a Spanish feel. (For more of Jason Carter's superb guitar playing, check out his website.)

However, the main instrumental theme and it's piano accompaniment owe more to Argentinian tango in terms of slinky chromaticism and slightly aggressive accents. Of course, there is a piano accordion involved (played by the idiosyncratic and inventive Martin White, leader of the Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra) rather than the traditional bandoneon, and other aspects of the piece don't fit the tango template either. The violin part in particular develops beyond the main theme into territory which is distinctly middle-eastern in flavour, although it's worth noting that the flattened second which crops up so often is also frequently employed by the flamenco guitar.

Needless to say, I enjoy fusing musical styles in a lot of my work, so I didn't feel the need to make an exception here. Music is a truly international language; only people care about policing borders.

The object of the singer's affection has been lured away from her hot-blooded amour by something supernatural in the form of a woman. Although the goddess Aurora in Roman mythology is one who takes a mortal lover, the northern lights (Aurora Borealis) were also viewed historically as Gods/Goddesses appearing to mortals, with the name Aurora meaning 'the red dawn'. The red is traditionally associated with war and death, but the northern lights also typically feature blue, violet and green.

The range of colours I go through suggest the northern version, but I was quite happy to fuse these two mythical settings, just as I had the musical styles. I think the end result is something quite magical in its own right, particularly with Bryony's soaring soprano purity set against Charlie Brown's fiendish fiddling. All the musicians involved here were top notch, and I'm mightily grateful for their collective input.

Anyone who has been to the UK will probably know that the British love to talk about the weather. It's our default setting for small talk, when forced by circumstance to be making it (obviously a slightly embarrassed silence would be preferable). It rather helps that the prevailing south-westerly winds bring in fronts of rain on a regular basis, thus making the weather very changeable more often than not. Our latitude means we should be a lot colder than we are, but the Gulf Stream ensures otherwise, although sometimes the wind slips round to bring us chill winds or baking heat from continental Europe, depending on the season. No wonder we don't trust them.

(that's a joke, btw)

The concept behind THE FORECASTER is fairly straightforward: the narrator (Jon Payne on fine form again) is singing about the poetic beauty of a slightly bizarre imaginary weather forecast which mixes the commonplace with the fanciful ('Clouds moving southwards/Hazardous ambassadors'), and in doing so he is imagining the forecaster herself singing it.

However, as explained above, one way of reading this is as a commentary on the English psyche and how we default to weather as the bedrock of our shared experience and identity, the thing which is ever shifting and yet always safe and reliable compared to wishy-washy things like emotion or politics. A broad generalisation, to be sure, but there's a kernel of truth there.

One further forecast connection is with the piece 'Sailing By' by Ronald Binge. This slow gentle waltz features regularly before the late shipping forecast on BBC Radio 4, and its trademark rising and falling woodwind accompaniment is something I mimicked in the string accompaniment during the verses. A very sincere and heartfelt piece of plagiarism, I can assure you, and, as such, another little nudge in the direction of the counterpart song.

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So there you have the complete lowdown from one to ten. There was originally an eleventh track as a brief intro, but I decided not to include it in order to make the concept neater and the opening punchier.

The anagram artwork was a concept I had way back when the album idea was first born. I particularly like the way that each one working from the top down seems to connect in some obscure way with the songs in their order on the album. Gary Collins deserves a big, big thank you for rendering that image so beautifully. He also came up with the idea of the origami animals and heart (in the wallet and lyric booklet) as a further development of the Alterations theme.