1. Executive Summary

The last song off of the first album was called “Conclusion” and it was just that, a brief concluding remark of the whole album. When I was first trying to write the album, I thought it’d be a cool idea to continue in that manner to have a bit of a cohesion from one to the other. Executive Summary is as brief a summation of the point I was trying to get across with this album. It has a real slow build to it which I love and it feeds directly into the second song on the album, they are almost a part 1 and a part 2 of each other.

2. 8 Hours in Stansted.

This song kicks in with the same key as the first track but is very different, it is much more up tempo, faster with a few different time signatures. My main aim musically with this album was to write a pop record with a solid mix of both math and punk elements. For me, this song kind of embodies all of these elements into one song. There is a real noodley guitar part towards the end which I think is a pretty big development from the first record. This is now the most fun song to play live!

3. White Washed Corridor

White Washed Corridor is going back to the brutally honest and close to home lyrics that I feel Anna’s Anchor has become known for. The song itself is about trying to come to terms with my mother’s alcoholism and the really dangerous and difficult path I had to take in order to try and find someone that could lend a helpful ear. The councillor in my university was a catholic priest and to say he was no help is an understatement. I lost a lot of faith in a lot of things at that moment, but it also freed me in some sort of weird way. This song is the first one on the record that features harmonies from my friend Clare O’Brien of Randolf & The Crokers. I’m very lucky to have them as friends and she’s such an amazing vocalist.

4. Precautionary

This song is going back to the more riff heavy math-y song that I was searching for. I was listening to a lot of Reuben at the time so that certainly was a strong influence. The outro is by far the heaviest thing Anna’s Anchor has done and tracking it was the best fun. We layered about 8 guitars on that outro and this is where both the engineering of Mike Gavin and the mixing of John Goodmanson shines! Lyrically the song is routed around the definition of sustainability, the idea of the world that you hand onto the next generation is to be in better condition than the one you received. I don’t think this has ever happened socially, politically or environmentally and it’s only getting worse with every generation.

5. Four Quarters Interlude.

This is a sparse little interlude that I wanted to interject to bring things down a little before the second half of the album. When I had the whole album demo’d before we went to record, I had something completely different in here but I felt that what I was singing about originally was already covered in other songs by the time I finished writing the album so I scrapped it completly and started from scratch. I’m really happy with how it turned out, we used a couple of room mics for the acousitc guitar to give it more a reverb rich sound and tried to layer as much harmonies as my limited range is capable of.

6. 50 States

This is another heavier song, the drums are in half time which is a very weird one for us. This was by far the hardest song to write and put together off the new album. It took considerably more time to put together than the other tracks. The outro to it is very different to the rest of the song which is a bit of a theme in the album. It was heavily influenced by bands like Delta Sleep, it’s a dance’y off time bit of fun which couldn’t be further removed from the borderline breakdown intro. Lyrically, this song is one born out of frustration with how America thinks the whole world revolves around its own problems. It is a super power but the reality is I’m from the back arse of nowhere in the South West of Ireland so I don’t want to hear about its problems ALL the time. We’ve got our own here to worry about.

7. Johnny Cash Was A Punk.

I wrote this song whilst on tour in America last Fall. It was an amazing trip for a whole host of reasons and I feel so lucky to have fulfilled a life long dream. That said, I was a little bit disillusioned from some of things I saw and the way people treated each other. Preaching one message of treating everyone with respect and then turning around afterwards to be a complete arsehole to everybody. It’s not a mindset that I was raised on, and to be frank I have no time for it. Since this song lyrically is about conflicting messages, I thought the most conflicting thing of all would be to have the instrumentation quite stripped back and happy feeling. This was another track where I was very fortunate to have had Clare O’Brien lay down some beautiful harmonies.

8. Summer Camp

Summer Camp was a tune that we actually originally released months and months before the album was even recorded. It was a little taster to just throw out into the world as to the change of direction and keep people interested during the inevitable dropoff period during the recording and releasing of the upcoming album. Again, it’s actually a pretty sad one lyrically but has the most up beat tempo and pop-py chorus on the album. It’s a super fun song about a super sad subject, lovely!

9. For The Parish.

During the writing of this album, one of my best friends sadly and abruptly passed away. It crushed me and my close group of friends. It still does. Even now as we’re gearing up for the release shows, one of the biggest thoughts in my mind is that he isn’t going to be there. If you purchase the physical copy of the album, you’ll also find that the album’s dedicated in his memory. Without going too much into it, the song is about the immediate few days after that. Grief is something that no one in life can avoid, but it was important for me to document the impact that his friendship had on me.

10. Appendix A,B & C

This is a song that seems to be throwing people in a bit of a tizzy when it comes to reviews which is funny. Before I wrote the album, I had a list of about 15 subject matters that I wanted to write about. The list of important things that I needed to get off my chest. I only got through about 11 of those in the first 9 songs, so similarly to an Appendix in a document, this is the few things that I just wasn’t able to get around to in the other songs. Because it’s supplementary information, I recorded it super lofi with one mic in a very old building on the Dock Road of Limerick called “The Sailor’s Home”. It’s a real curve ball thrown in at the end, but it serves its purpose and I wouldn’t have been satisfied leaving out all of those ideas. The album would feel incomplete to me if I didn’t. Now it is complete and finished off in Limerick City.