Welcome To the Darwin's Blog!

As we wend our way to launching our album in April, we (okay, I!) thought it would be a good idea to have more dynamic content on the website, and I (being Alan) tends to default to creating a blog when these sorts of thoughts enter my mind!

It's not always obvious how much time and preparation goes into making an album - first comes the song-writing, this has been in progress for the best part of two years. Ideas, words, melodies - they come to the rehearsal space and get bashed around into what we ultimately start to introduce at gigs, then start thinking about whether we want to include them as recordings.

We're now at the stage where we've refined all our songs, we've chosen the tracks we want to include, recorded all the music - lots of it at Ellie's studio, and a chunk at the amazing Riff Factory in Stoke-on-Trent under the watchful eye (and ear) of Tom Carter. Tom is currently underway with the not inconsiderable process of mixing and mastering our individual contributions into one big cohesive whole.

The rough mixes he's already shared with us are already sounding really good, to our ears at least - the proof of the pudding will be ultimately of course be what you all think!

Everything is nicely on schedule to meet our deadlines, which is good - the music will be packaged in CDs lovingly designed by Alan and Ella, once those details and finalised and the music is ready they can be ordered for production - hurrah! Which means we should have them all ready for the album launch night on 26th April at Rough Trade in Nottingham.

Did we mention that had sold out? That was a humbling moment for us - we got to around 50% sold and were feeling very pleased about that, but in February a flurry of sales turned into a flood and it was sold out!

So anyway, the plan is to use this space sporadically to capture anything we want to at the time - we might do some 'getting to know you' type interview activity with members of the band, insight into some of our songs, reflections on gigs or events we've played - anything goes really.

Of course, we might also forget about it and it will languish!

Let's hope not!

If you have ideas about things you'd like to see or read about, then let us know either in the comments below or however else you'd like to contact us!