Deer Park S/T debut album (2009)
This album was a total labour of love for me. I wrote the songs over a period of five years, starting with Waiting On A Change, which was written outside a gas station in Texas. In the space of a few months, I quit one of the worst jobs I've ever had and my father died. In the words of Nick Cave, "If anything terrible ever happens to you, form a band and go on tour."
I put together a band with two friends and hired the incredible Paul Hollingsworth to produce. We holed up in a huge room above a run down pub in Streatham that was on the verge of being bulldozed and recorded 10 songs in three days. Most of what ended up on the record is either a first or second take. The last song, Nails, was something we came up with while waiting for Paul to come back from lunch. As soon as he came through the door, we started recording and that's the first take right there on the record. I was walking down Streatham High Street the next day and bumped into Mark Hamilton of Woodpigeon, on his way to collect CDs from his label. I dragged him in and he recorded the harmonies on Spanish Movies in about half an hour.
Once the album was done, I set about putting the package together. I wanted something that visually represented all the hard work we'd put into the music, so I didn't want just any old packaging and artwork. I went through my whole record collection and pulled out the covers I loved, finding that most of them had the same name inside: Jesse Le Doux, the former art director at Sub Pop. Jesse said yes, as did the wonderful artist Julie Miller (who drew the deer) and together they came up with the perfect artwork to represent our music.
