This is a collection of songs intended for a more mature audience which I wrote and recorded in my tin shed between making weekly episodes of my TV show in 2007-2008. All songs are available as free mp3 downloads, albeit at a fairly low bitrate of 128kbps.

They are included - at a much higher bitrate of 320kbps - as an mp3 album when you buy My Life as a Cartoon DVD.

Alternatively, they are available as part of my collected set of mp3 albums which you get for free when you buy my Human Biology and Where Does Food Come From? DVDs.

A little bit of background about the songs:

1. Sitting on a fence: Inspired by the main political parties as they prepared for the general election in New Zealand in 2008

2. Magic charms: Wrote this one a while ago and it sat in my very large box of unrecorded (and possibly unrecordable) songs, until one dark night in 2007 I thought I'd have a go at recording it. Used the sounds of a car engine, heart beat, telelphones, and a football crowd as the main percussive\rhythmical elements in the backing track. Inspired by an unusual local identity to be seen in black clothes and white make-up driving around the streets of Oamaru in a car emblazoned with existentialist slogans about the purpose of life being death.

3. Separate lives: The main divide refers to the Southern Alps (for those unfamiliar with the geography of New Zealand: the chain of mountains running down the middle of the South Island).

4. The dome: Had a nice dream one night in 2007 involving the story in this one. Next morning I sat in bed and wrote the song for it.

5. Forty five: A song I wrote for a friend who's almost a year younger than me.

6. Oamaru: A fairly accurate portrayal of my hometown.

7. Vegetable love: Most of the people in my neighbourhood grow vegetables, and folk really do gaze with longing at their neighbours' produce (at least I do). I am a hopeless gardener

8. Hanami: This was the first song I wrote after I arrived in Japan, about the Spring "Cherry Blossom Festival" where people sit under blossom trees and get tipsy on beer and sake.

9. Looking for a war: I can see a cruise missile zeroing in on my shed. Time to take the Osama bin Laudin poster down.

10. In the morning: Inspired by the poetry of Propertius and Catullus (Latin poets I studied a few years ago). From memory, the lines in the bridge are a fairly direct crib from one of them (Catullus?).

11. Kagoshima blues: Went and worked for a month in the city of Kagoshima (at the bottom of the island of Kyushu in Japan) a few years ago. Wrote it while I was there.

12. Nobody takes me seriously: What more can I say?

13. A hat made out of felt: Wrote this one in 2007 after the annual gypsy fair visited Oamaru. Maybe if I stopped singing songs like this on open mike nights people would take me more seriously.

14. The moon princess: Incidental music I wrote for a traditional Japanese story (I worked on with a local storyteller for my TV show) about a beautiful girl a bamboo cutter finds inside a piece of bamboo.