Bittersweet, Darkness & Light

Album Liner Notes

Firstly, THANK YOU for being here. I'm very grateful for you taking the time to listen to this, my first album, of my own original songs.

It has been many years in the making, decades even, after myriad attempts, false starts, setbacks, and life and career sending me in other directions first. Plus the affliction of being a perfectionist who will always see something that could be improved and will forever find reasons to keep tweaking rather than publish.

I'd like to thank everyone who has made this possible – but that's mostly just me really 😂 It has been very much a solo effort, but perhaps necessarily so – I think I was maybe trying to prove to myself that I could... But thanks especially to my family and friends who have given encouragement and endured me talking about it for literally years.

I want also to pay tribute to my friend Jamie Freeman, who would have produced this album had he not died first. The things people will do to avoid working with me, eh – fate worse than death etc (don't worry, he would have laughed at that).

Jamie was an extraordinary musician, songwriter, all-round good person generally, and a great friend. I was in his band (The Jamie Freeman Agreement) for many years, and learned a huge amount from him, about music, performing, songwriting, not to mention swearing, dubious jokes, and dodgy puns. We had a lot of fun.

He offered many times to produce my album, but I wasn't ready. And then it was too late. After putting up a heroic fight, he lost his battle with brain cancer in December 2022. The fates are cruel.

But his death did give me the impetus to 'get on with it'. So although not in the way I had hoped or wanted, he nonetheless was instrumental in making this album happen. Thank you Jamie, for everything. Rest in peace.

Now, back to me 😂

It's always daunting, and rather nerve-wracking, to put out into the world something you've created, baring your soul, giving away a part of yourself, not knowing how it will be received, or whether anyone will even hear or see it.

I hope you will enjoy listening to the songs on this album. If you can spare the 43 minutes, please do listen to them all the way through, in order, from start to finish. My intention was for this to be experienced as an album, in sequence, rather than just as a collection of singles to be dipped in and out of. But up to you, as you wish.

I suppose in some ways these songs represent my life's work. Or part of it, anyway. Some of them have their origins as far back as the 1990s, when I was but a kid, and most of them have evolved over at least a few years to these versions as-recorded here.

I can still remember writing Mary Lou in my tiny room in halls at university, inspired by a film I'd seen on television. I used to play an acoustic version here and there at open mics, where I would introduce it as a song about the American Dream gone wrong. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Maybe it's an allegory. Or maybe just a song about a lost girl. I suppose it might make a good car-song for those long journeys, although perhaps more for the passengers than the driver – it gets a little soporific towards the end!

Little Miss Precious came to me during a break around the same time – I remember taking it to my then band upon returning to uni and rehearsing it, but I don't think we ever gigged it. It was loosely about someone – with a lot of artistic licence – but I'm not going to say who.

Straight In Off The Rebound, Walk Away and Get It Your Way were written at my first home in Brighton, sometime in the late 1990s. Not sure they were about anyone in particular, but perhaps composites, archetypes, made up characters, drawn from elements of the myriad people I met or observed along the way. Get It Your Way was just an attempt at having some fun with words, running the lines together, originally intended as a throwaway pop song really, but I quite like how it turned out.

I've Got You has been through various incarnations – I originally envisaged it as something a bit gothy (I was going through a Sisters of Mercy phase and had been listening to tracks like More, Dominion, Lucretia and This Corrosion perhaps a little too much. Talking of This Corrosion, Lamb Chop's version is excellent, but I digress); then it was going to be something more acoustic; then back to a rock song (with perhaps a smattering of The Cult and Billy Idol as influences). I'm not really sure what it is now – but I think I quite like it. It's the only track on the album with some keyboard parts.

If You Don't Get Out Now was written on a plane, inspired by the unfortunate travails of a dear friend.

The Easy Way Out and Keep On Keeping On are more recent. The former started out as a snippet of a verse and part of a chorus many many years ago, but it really only took form a year or two ago when certain events gave me the inspiration to finish it. And similarly, the latter is a product of events, written around the time Brexit was all kicking off. Make of both what you will...

The album opener, Going Crazy – I honestly don't remember when or where that came from. I have vague recollections of writing it, and a bunch of others – quite a productive time – while visiting my dad in the USA in the early or mid 1990s, but who knows. It's just a story.

Most of my stuff is stories actually. Observations. Situations that may or may not have happened. Characters who may or may not be real. Let's say mostly fictitious – which I daresay is what the lawyers would want me to say 😂

It's funny though, despite being written over a period of decades, now that I've brought them together in one place on this album, they do seem to have something of a theme, or perhaps a couple of themes, intertwined threads running through it all, creating an overarching narrative that's perhaps something just a little more than the sum of the individual parts.

I don't know. I'm probably too close to it to really see it, or to be in a good position to reflect on it. Something subconscious maybe. See what you think.

I hope it's not all too dark! On which subject, the album title. Nothing to do with chocolate! I felt it reflected the songs' emotions – a mixture of bittersweet stories, dark moods, and lighthearted humour (or sardonic irony, perhaps). Or maybe I just liked the way it sounded – it has a certain rhythm to it, I think.

For anyone interested in the technical stuff, the songs here were almost all entirely recorded and mixed in Apple Logic Pro. I used my self-designed Hirsch SB-1 Radius electric guitar and a Strymon Iridium amp simulator pedal for the guitar side of things, and on the vocal side, an Aston Origin microphone inside an Isovox mobile vocal booth, and a KlarkTeknik 76-KT hardware compressor. Bass tracks were a combination of a Squire Jazz Bass and an Ibanez SRF700 fretless.

Then a Mackie 802VLZ4 analogue mixer going into an Audient iD4 interface, feeding into an Apple Mac M2 Studio.

Drums throughout are Logic's built-in software drummer, though it took a fair bit of configuration tweaking, and even here and there some individual midi note edits, to get parts I was happy with.

The exception is Mary Lou, which was the first track I recorded. This started life in GarageBand on a first-generation iPad Pro, with an early 1990s Fernandez Stratocaster going via a Vox Amplug into an Apogee Jam interface. A Blue Spark desktop USB microphone handled vocal duties, with an old duvet providing some basic sound isolation. The bass track on this was sequenced in GarageBand, due to me not having a bass guitar at the time. I later took it all into Logic for mixing.

The acoustic guitar parts on The Easy Way Out are a Yamaha SLG200S Silent Guitar, plugged directly into the Mackie desk.

Within Logic, I used entirely built-in stock plugins, with one exception – TDR Nova Dynamic EQ from Tokyo Dawn Labs. A very useful tool indeed.

For mixing I used Presonus Eris E3.5 and Yamaha HS8 powered studio monitors, and also Steven Slate VSX headphones. I bought the latter about halfway through the process, and found they made a huge difference – I would say they're indispensable. They do exactly what they're meant to do, extremely well, I think.

Mastering was with HOFA CD-Burn app. A useful product at good price, albeit with my UX hat on (I was a User Experience designer in a previous life), I think the user interface could do with some improvement.

Recording, mixing, and mastering took place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

© Copyright 2025 Jonathan Hirsch. All rights reserved.