So this has been a long time coming.

There's a bit of a story here. Way back in 2012 I started work on what I was calling at the time "a 3-track EP". Over the course of the last 5 years those 3 tracks became 4, then 5, then 7 and after that it gets a little foggy but at one point I believe it reached an 18 track album. I have been talking about this project to anyone who will listen to me for so long I forget when I started. It has been through dozens of drastically different incarnations and recordings and re-recordings and mixes and remixes and re-remixes. Songs have come and gone and occasionally come back only to be replaced by completely reworked arrangements of themselves. The name itself and the artwork has changed repeatedly. At one point I pulled together a group of musicians to become the tickbox live act, which was quickly disbanded when I realised I wasn't comfortable playing these songs live and decided that tickbox should be a writing and recording project only. Come to think of it I didn't even go by tickbox at the start of all this (I went through several names before settling on tickbox, one of my personal favourites being the Powerpuff Girls inspired "Jojo and the Mojos").

I was so focused on making this perfect, and it backfired. Around a year and a half ago, after finishing the 8th attempt at mixing the album (which at that time contained 12 tracks) I suddenly realised that I couldn't stand listening to it anymore. I had completely burnt out any motivation I had for completing this project, and with that I started to become acutely aware of what was bad about it. This was a collection of songs that I had recorded way back when I didn't really know how to record, mixed when I didn't know how to mix and mastered when I didn't know how to master, and all my dozens of re-attempts and adjustments were doing was making it marginally better, in some cases worse. I wasn't even a particularly good musician when I recorded most of these songs, and as a result my drumming is sloppy, my guitar playing is all over the place (the guitar solo in "broken" might be the worst guitar solo in history) and my singing is FULL of tuning issues. Up until this point I had been treating all that as a grungey gimmick of the album but I couldn't hear anything but those issues anymore. On top of that, I had been listening to these songs repeatedly for so long that I could no longer accurately hear what I could do to make them better (in terms of mixing) without completely starting from scratch, and what I could hear required a huge amount of work to fix. But the sound itself wasn't even the biggest problem: I no longer identified with the songs. I had written the majority of them so long ago I didn't even feel like the same person as the one who was singing. Lyrically I was singing about things that had happened so long ago that I just didn't feel those same feelings anymore. I didn't care anymore about a lot of things I cared about and was writing about at the time. In that time I had been writing new songs that were going to appear on whatever my next album/ep was, but I realised that I was MUCH prouder of those songs. I have improved hugely as a songwriter over the last 5 years and I felt like these songs no longer represented my best work.

All of this came together in my head at the same time, and I realised that if I wanted this album to be exactly what I wanted it to be I had 2 options: completely start again, right from the start, new recordings, new mixes, new masters, new everything. I could maybe finally put out something I was proud of in terms of the technical, audio side of things, but it would mean going through the entire process again with these songs and I would still have an album full of songs that I don't identify with anymore, albeit a little shinier and nicer. Or, I scrap the album entirely.

That was a decision I did not want to make, so I didn't listen to any of the songs for almost a year and a half.

So at this point you might be wondering how this ever actually made it out into the world just above this incredibly lengthy and overdramatic description. A few days ago, just for the fun of it I listened to the album again for the first time in over 18 months, and a very strange thing happened. I liked the songs again. Something about where my life is now and the way I feel connected with the lyrics again, but in completely new ways. They made sense again, but they were about very different things than they were back then. The happy parts were about my current friends, and break-up songs had become songs about the difficulties of being in a very long-distance relationship. That's as much detail as I'll go into on that but you get the point. And no, it's still not a representation of my best work. The performances are still very messy, the recording, mixing and mastering are still nowhere near what I can do now and I am a much better songwriter now than I was back then, but frankly, I don't care.

So I brutally axed almost half of the 12 songs that were on there, leaving the ones that I'm the most proud of (plus 1 or 2 fan favourites), and I'm just releasing it. Other than the tracklist itself and and the title, I'm not touching anything. I spent WAY too much time on this to let it just vanish forever. It is gonna be out there in the world regardless of the form it's currently in, regardless of what could be better or worse about it, regardless of how much I think it's actually a good piece of work, it is going to be out there. I am doing this at half past 5 in the morning and it is definitely possible that this a stupid, sleep-deprived idea, but I don't care. I'm doing it anyway. Love it or hate it, this is now a thing.

So here. Here is a collection of songs written and recorded over a 3 and a half year stretch of my life on my own in my bedroom, agonised over, forgotten about, rediscovered, and then forced out into the world with an ironic title (I gave long and serious thought to actually just calling it "fuck it" so be happy with the title it got).

Apologies for the long description, thank you if you read all the way through, and if you decided to download this thank you so much, you are a wonderful person. Hope you enjoy. Hugs and shit <3