The standard thing to say around an album release is that you’re excited or whatever. I am excited about releasing ‘In The Rain’, kind of, but that’s not the primary feeling I associate with this album coming out.

I’ve been sitting on these songs for a *long* time. Some of them are pretty much a decade old, and even the more recent ones are from 2020 at the earliest. I’ve had the recordings since 2020 now as well.

Over this period of time, my relationship with these songs, myself and music in general has changed a lot. I turned 30 recently, and I’ve been ~taking stock~ of my life. While I’m happy for many things that have come my way, I’d also be lying if I said I had done everything I wanted to do by this point.

Unfortunately, these songs have come to be both symptom and cause of a rut - both a musical one and a more general life-direction one - that I’ve got myself into the past few years. Over time, fixating on ‘In The Rain’ has increasingly become a mechanism for me blocking myself from making other music I want to make - not starting new projects because I felt like I should be focussing on getting in gear to release this one, not doing a whole *other* bunch of stuff I’ve written that I’ve now been sitting on for ages as well - as well as just not committing in a more general sense. Honestly, the stuff I do as M-G Dysfunction has come about in large part as a sort of tumour that’s grown out of ‘In The Rain’, all the frustration about the fact that I’ve allowed myself to complicate my relationship to music in such a major way made manifest as … whatever M-G Dysfunction is. Basically it’s fucking stupid, and at this stage I need to get rid of all that and do something else with my life.

I’m also just like, not this person any more. A lot of the people who inspired these songs are out of my life now, and I include the version of myself who wrote them in that. I don’t see life the same way as him, and I don’t see music-making the same way as him either. I only occasionally write songs like these now, and I don’t really want this sort of music to be my focus for the foreseeable future.

I’ve sat with these songs/recordings for so long that honestly I can’t tell if they’re good any more. I’m proud of writing it all, but also the fact that I’ve let them become this albatross for me is a sign that I was probably too proud of them. There are (many) lessons in here for me, the main one being that I should Just Get On With It. After all this time of waiting for the opportune moment to release ‘In The Rain’, I think that moment may actually have passed, and I don’t want to be beholden to the wistful/heartbroken/whatever version of myself who is the main character in these songs.

There will also be an EP coming out called ‘In The Reeds’, and maybe I’ll hoover up some demos/alternate versions of these songs at some point too. If anyone wants to help get together a physical release of this material then give me a shout as well.


So here they are. Some songs which have been in your life for no time at all, and in mine for many years. I hope you like them.