Looking back now it was, in fact, the worst time of my life and I was the architect of it all. My musical 'career' spanned a decade from 2004 upon being signed and the name Elison being created, to 2014 when everything changed. Some of you may have noticed in the biography on this site a mention of the start of Elison and yet the earliest public release on this, or any other site is from 2014. The reason for this is my wife Sam and the effect she had on everything.



It may seem trite, but before meeting her I really knew nothing. I thought I did, and I wrote songs about all sorts of things, never entirely sure why they didn’t resonate that well. That’s not to say my new songs are changing the world, but there is so much more feeling and honesty in my output now that I had to leave all the pre-2014 output behind and start again. As it happens, everything in my life changed at this point. I had been attempting to be a professional musician and had been topping up that income with work as a music producer, recording engineer and a club DJ. I wasn’t particularly bad at these as I managed to get a decade of work out of DJ’ing and my musicianship and production skills accounted for my early label signing, but I wasn’t at all happy in myself pursuing this path. Sam encouraged me to leave all that behind, start a new business and forge a path towards a better life, and one I couldn’t be happier with.

I’m sure you can tell; I didn’t give up on music. It just became a hobby as it should always have been and now, I love it again! The style of the songs has changed in line with my character and are much more positive than before, but a few of the songs I did write in those darker times have stayed with me. Although my understanding of relationships and love were immature, other moments in my life had produced reasonable songs that have always remained some of my personal favourites, but had never been released. This new mini album is a collection of seven songs from around 2005 to 2008 that are the ones that I really liked and that I could still remember every word of when I can barely remember the names of most other tracks written at that time. They are markedly different to what I do these days, as they are about tragic times and I don’t like to dwell on those anymore, but they were vital moments in my personal story and things I can never forget.

Looking at them in such depth in the last few weeks during recording I have come to realise there is a great deal of hope that I hadn’t noticed at the time. Maybe I was always a much more positive person than I realised, just covered in excess fat and hair. The hair has gone and some of the fat, but the positivity very much remains.