The album was recorded between March and December 2008. I finished the first mix of the album in January 2009, and took it to Abbey Road in London to be mastered at the end of that month. Though I learned quite a lot from the experience, the Abbey Road master of the album was ultimately discarded due to a number of sonic elements with which I was unhappy. I began remixing at the end of February 2009 and then mastered it myself over a number of months, finishing at the end of June 2009. The writing of the album spans from 2005 to 2008, and I've laid out the following paragraphs loosely in the order that the writing of each song started.

Theme
This is the oldest composition on the album, written around November 2005. It's also the only song which entirely predates the events that inspired the album. The lyrics are somewhat crass, for which I can offer no apology. Guilt is always heightened by the feeling that we could have foreseen our mistake; I chose to include Theme on the album because it was hard to ignore it as something of a portent. It's not important for understanding the song as such, but there's an oblique reference to a line from the British television series Spaced in the last section which was quite deliberate.

Beneath her
This was written in September 2007, the premise of the song being, admittedly, a somewhat base pun. My intention was to taint the clichéd notion of pining over the idealised lost love with some of the less comfortable realities that we're supposed to gloss over.

The sin
I wrote the The sin in November 2007, having devised most of the lyrics over the two preceeding months. I arranged the strings and recorded it in August 2008, after I decided to include it on the album. The sin typifies a particular philosophy that songs should be designed to communicate feelings uncompromised by any allusion to the objective reality behind those feelings. The song doesn't tell you what happened, but rather it tells you how it felt. That philosophy underlies the writing of the whole album. While there are repeated references to being lied to, there were no actual lies in the real-life events that inspired the album.

Thinking of you
I wrote Thinking of you in March 2008, and made the decision to record the album shortly after I finished it. I re-recorded most of the vocals for this at the end of the project, with the exception of the final sequence - which I kept from the very first draft. Aside from being a perfect take of what I wanted to capture, I like that the end of the album is actually from the beginning.

Haze
In the tradition of Irish lyricists before me, the stars metaphor in Haze is drawn from a line in Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan. I will confess that "I'm still looking for wild stars between the clouds" additionally contains a dreadful pun, for which I deserve no forgiveness. Haze was written at the start of April 2008 and was the first song that I deliberately composed and recorded after I'd decided to make the album.

Emily begins to realise
This will probably always be my own favourite track of the album. My intention wasn't to express the feelings of an epiphany, but rather to try and express my own feelings following the revelation of someone else's epiphany.

The falling sky
The rain fall in the background of this track was recorded through the open window of the room in which I made the album. The pathetic fallacy of rain is one of the great and terrible songwriting clichés, but I was more trying to capture that odd sense of nostalgia that's created by how rain separates us - both physically and by its gentle dominion over the soundscape. Looking up as it rained, I kept finding myself wondering if she was under the same sky. The opening line, which repeats throughout, is an intentional echo of a line from the opening paragraph of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. The number of "hours since" in the lyrics of the second verse was slightly changed from it's original so that it would be correct to the hour in which I recorded the singing for that verse.

And then she enters my life
I started composing this in late May 2008 with the intention of writing another instrumental. When I finished it in August, it had become a song. I spent a lot of that summer reading back over old IM conversations, and most of the lyrics arose from that - "hello" and "hello indeed" being the actual opening lines of the first conversation, and the spoken part which appears towards the end being a self-quotation from the same conversation. My comment seemed sadly but drastically ironic in retrospect, so it satisfied my sense of humour to include it.

The darkness alights
I wrote this between June and August of 2008, to try and fulfil a very specific need to bridge a gap between Theme and the rest of the album. I've always liked Theme because there's a horrible honesty to it, but it also makes me uncomfortable, so it's probable that I wrote The darkness alights to try and put Theme into a more comfortable context.

My selfish heart
Some of the lyrics for My selfish heart go back as far as late 2007, but I wrote and recorded the music for the song as a whole in September 2008.

My descent from grace
I composed this piece of music in late September and early October 2008.

I am yours
The lyrics for this were written in dissociated fragments probably stretching from April of 2008 right up when the song was finished in October. I knew how I wanted this song to end before I even started it, right down to the circa-1992-Rock fadeout.

Unfeeling
This was the second-to-last song to be composed for the album, written in November of 2008. The recording of the acoustic guitar which opens the song was made as a demo in mid-July 2006, originally to be part of the music for a song I was trying to write called "Fourteen". It was during the second week of a three-week long drum session for another recording, so I sat on the drum seat and used the drum overhead microphones to capture the guitar, which is why you can hear the slightly audible buzzing of the snare resonating with the guitar. Most of the core events which inspired the album occurred around this time, so I later decided to sample the original demo recording of that guitar out of a slightly perverse sense of nostalgia and sentimentality. The drum samples used throughout the album were also made during that month.

Fourteen
This is the last song I wrote for the album, at the end of December 2008. The recurring poker metaphor in the lyrics came from the words of an unfinished song of the same name that I'd been writing back in the summer of 2006; the name of the song being somewhat tied to the metaphor. As another piece of random album trivia, the lyrics for Fourteen appear on page 14 of the inlay booklet.

About the photography and design
I took the photographs for the album between September 2008 and July 2009. All of the photos are taken in Celbridge in Co. Kildare - the most remote piece actually being the photo of a "no right turn" road sign near the M4 Interchange that was used in the composite image for The sin.

The photo for the cover of the album was taken around the grounds of the Castletown House estate, sometime between twilight and dusk on the 9th of January 2009. The Jobe clef logo on the cover was originally designed by my brother, Declan, way back in the late 90s. He drew this updated version for me in 2006 to go on my bass guitar.

My favourite photo is Emily begins to realise, which was taken on the drive of Castletown House in the particularly sunny Autumn of 2008.

Eoin Madsen
2010-04-11