I'm Neil and this is a wee website to gather together some of the various creative projects I've done over the years. Partly it's an archive and partly it's a live works-in-progress type blog thingy.
Oh, and in case you're wondering, the title is a Mackem / Pitmatic rendering of "home-made in Sunderland"
It's a good few years since I've done any web-coding and I'm very rusty so it's likely to take a while to get this all sorted out. Plus there's quite a lot of material to be added, so please bear with 's....
29/9/26:- Well that was disappointing
After 6 or 7 weeks of mucking about I finally finished "Ah Boy" last night: threw together the rest of the instrumental, then wrote a load of lyrics (a couple of 16 bar rap verses, plus the rest of the chorus, which is sung) and even recorded them. Coming back to it again today was sore though. I kind of hate it. The lyrics, which are about toxic masculinity, sound gawky as hell and the chorus is pretty weak. Right now I don't know if this track should be cut off the album or if it might still work as just an instrumental, or even if I could re-do lyrics and vocals. The latter option doesn't seem too appealing in all honesty. I mean, the song more or less says what I wanted to say, although it does all feel kind of artless and on-the-nose. Think I should sit on it for a while. It does sometimes happen that I hate a song the day after finishing it, so maybe my attitude to it will soften when the penduluum swings back the other way.
Other than that song though, I'm also thinking of dropping another track called "Desire Lines" - not because I hate it but just because stylistically it feels a bit too similar to a couple of other tracks on the record and I don't think it's really bringing anything distinct to the mix. It's a decent track but perhaps not quite as strong as it needs to be to feel like anything more than filler. I'd still need to write something else to replace it though, and don't have any particular notion of what. I still haven't started the closing track either, though I do have a pretty good idea of what I want from it. Finally, I have also done (last weekend, actually) the cover art which I'm about as happy with as I'll ever be considering it's got my mug on it. All told, I'm still on track to get this done in time.