Why have we done it?

It wasn’t even midnight, yet I couldn’t find anywhere open in the city that never sleeps. There’s more life in Omagh it seems than the big smoke.

Eventually I saw a light on and entered.

The place was Japanese, nobody spoke English.

I pointed to the first thing on the menu that I couldn’t read, in the hope that I was pointing to a tasty cocktail.

I took my seat, and 15 minutes later, the guy came to my table with a plate of fried calamari.

I ate it, not wanting to be rude – despite just having a large plate of chips an hour prior, along with Declan, the studio producer and collaborator, who was my host for the week.

The chips were the dessert… after ten pints of Guinness being the main meal.

We had just competed yet another album.

Who knows when this one will come out after the process of feeding it through the industry machine.

Perhaps never.

Or maybe tomorrow.

It had begun as an accidental mistake, seven months previously in Tucson Arizona, with a day off after a wedding festival.

It morphed and evolved into something else in the following weeks and months, with elements being added and subtracted across oceans, between Ireland, Mexico, America and Japan.

And now it has come to lay its head to rest in London of all places.

None of this was planned.

It just hiccupped itself into reality.

A happy accident.

All contributors to the creation of this one are now in bewilderment and awe at what had taken shape, without plan, rhyme, or reason.

How do these things happen?

What force of nature is it that wills these things into existence?

Is it a shared manifestation?

Nobody could have planned it.

And if we attempted to, we’d only fall flat on our faces.

Yet here we have it.

A brand new record has blossomed before our ears, for better or for worse.

You’ll get to hear it some day, I’m sure.

In a few months.

Once the machine has eaten us up and spat us out, making us question what have we done… and why have we done it?