Presently two pieces of music I choose for continual listening are Tangled Up In Blue by Bob Dylan and Night by Fateh Ali Khan. Now the fact that I find the lyrics of hte former both stunning and puzzling is proof that I need no more meaningful explanation, even if I'm not sure what this classic is actually about, even if I find it all bamboozling - the melodic effect is enough to create this overwhelming sensation that leaves me falling in love with this song, time AND TIME AGAIN. It's just genius at work, simple as that. Moving onto the latter, the fact that this songbird sings in a language both ancient and wholly alien to me, only serves to enhance the living spirit of such incredibly powerful music, a music wholly capable of joyfully reducing me to tears - a music of real wonder.

The point being that with music - you either get it! Or you don't! And in my opinion, if you need to ask for an explanation as to what a song is about - well I'm afraid the signs are not so good. The secret is to listen carefully and both your imagination and emotions will tell you what's going on. They're never wrong. Fro those who could do with some help, here are some of our impressions behind the music of the latest new album. [Click on each song title for those].

Firstly, I'm not so sure that there is an overall lyrical theme to this set of recordings. Sometimes during the creation of an album a concept that seems to focus all the songs under one theme turns up and presents itself; almost as some natural conclusion. Often this concluding theme goes on to be the eventual album title as in both New Gold Dream (81,82,83,84) and Street Fighting Years although at no time did we sit down and try to come up with concepts and albums titled thus; in these cases it's just something that we arrived at. On other records there is no binding theme lyrically, the songs are connected only in some sonic sense and I feel pretty confident that this is the case with the current situation. I could be wrong though, maybe there is some theme that I'm too close to recognise. I wouldn't be surprised were that the case.

Therefore if this is to be an album without any obvious overall theme, as in other albums like Once Upon A Time, Sparkle In The Rain, Real Life etc, let's try to discover some "impressions" from the songs individually, and who knows we may even find some theme after all. For anyone interested, this is the first time I will have tried to articulate the songs to any extent since their creation, the reason being that we feel you can "talk away a song" at a too early stage and it's so much more interesting to work away at the ideas, following them through and letting the art determine whatever falls rightfully into place. The best ideas both lyrically and muscially seem to happen at random, the skill is how to then elaborate these ideas; but even more crucially perhaps is possessing the ability to be able to spot them when they initially occur.

At the risk of making the whole process sound overtly mystical it still has to be said for me at least that the level of concentration involved does indeed border on some kind of meditation; and it's at this point - when you feel so engaged with the music that "it" seems to be "speaking" to you - almost telling you where to go with the musical flow. Poor as it teherefore is, this is only a skeletal description of the "improvisation" involved in the early states of our writing - I am always abel to tell how things "strike" me but please don't be so mundane as to ask what it's all about because it's then that I becomre truly lost for words" - Jim, e-mail, 11th March 1998