This is a collection of songs intended for an adult 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.

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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.