Looking Back - Dusk

This is the fourth and (to date) final chapter of my Looking Back series, which brings us to from 2006 up to the present day. If you've been reading its predecessors then... well... you have a lot more patience than I have.

Anyway, if I'm not mistaken we started this blog about three months before its release, so a lot has been said already about our 2006 album Dusk. But if you're joining us now for the first time, maybe it will serve as a good introduction. This will sound horrifically pretentious, but for me, Dusk is really the story of my life from roughly 2002 to 2005. Obviously you put a lot of yourself into anything you do, so this could be said of anything we've done, but I think this helps explain Dusk. I was in my early twenties, going through a lot of change, and struggling to understand who I was, and what that meant (if anything).

It's an album I'm immensely proud of, but it is very dark, and listening back with the benefit of hindsight it suffers a bit from its production. We made mistakes - some of the bonus tracks and different versions on the singles are better - but we also recorded a pretty good album.

So anyway, roughly in chronological order, my personal highlights of 2006-2009:

1. Writing Red Shadows after an amazing day walking the streets of Berlin. It's very literal - when it says "I walked along the wall today," I really did. Well, alongside it, anyway
   
2. Being inspired to write I Have Never. And several of the other tracks actually, some of which are actually verging on being quite good songs. In my opinion
   
3. Putting MP3s on the internet for the first time, and people actually listening to them
4. Writing Beneath the Silent Skies on Ilkley Moor (I took a piece of paper with me)
   
5. Working out what Signs of Life was going to be about
6. Making the artwork for the CDs, based on Simon's amazing photos. Incidentally, the sleeve for The End may not look it, but it's our most photoshopped ever
   
7. People saying we were quite good. We've been sent a lot of nice comments over the last few years, which was surprising and very pleasant
   
8. Being asked to appear on the Electraparade compilation
9. Working out the Ostkreuz mix of The End. Someone commented that we sounded a bit like Kraftwerk, so we duly made it sound more like them
   
10. Putting the iDusk EP on iTunes, and people actually wasting money on it. Thus far we have almost doubled our money on it, although we're not entirely sure how or why
    

That concludes this series of blogs. Whatever will come next?