Welcome: The Confuser

A new album is born...

Finally! Today! At last my latest record album swims into the public ear, or at least somewhere public ear-adjacent. Yes: The Confuser is at hand - so what exactly is it?

Once again, I’ve corralled together 10 songs in an order that I think makes sense. This time it happened very fast. When 2025 swung through through its gate with the inane swagger that only a new year can muster, I was writing songs for a potential album with Emma Swift, my wife, record company boss, and frequent muse. She and I accordingly recorded a collection of duets in LA, but then decided the project needed to sit for a while before we could properly finish it.

So Emma asked me if I’d like to make an album of my own, a rock album, in Nashville with some of the people we’ve recently come to know over here. She suggested for starters our friend Jeremy Fetzer, a consummate local Telecaster player, who coincidentally does a lot of the graphic design for our label Tiny Ghost Records. Fetzer is a dapper cat, and plays that way too. I close my eyes and I can see the flock of notes he plays make patterns in the air.

Emma also mooted me working with Eric Slick, drummer with Dr Dog, among others. He’d played drums remotely on “Socrates In Thin Air” on my lockdown album SHUFFLEMANIA! - he did a fabulous job. So Eric and I met for coffee and bonded over Captain Beefheart. We drained our cups and he was in.

Eric recruited a new face on bass, Todd Bolden.

“Does he speak McCartney?” I asked. Oh yes, replied Eric, he certainly does. So Todd was in too. I had already talked Beatles with Fetzer and Slick; I can’t work with any musician who doesn’t love them as much as I do. Todd completes the pack of Fabs disciples.

Fellow Beatle person Brad Jones had played bass with three of my 1990s opening acts on tour: Matthew Sweet. Murray Attaway and Jill Sobule, whose life was tragically taken by flames last year. Brad has been my go-to recording engineer in Nashville for quite some time, so he was a natural to engineer this album and, ultimately, produce it.

What can I tell you about the songs? Mainly that most of them materialised in my notebook last summer while Emma was away on tour. I had the house and our cats, Ringo and Tubby, to myself. The felines are the ideal audience for protean compositions gestating in solitude. For me songs either appear or they don’t - if I try to force them into being, I’m rewarded with counterfeit ones: fake songs that have no true identity or core. Real songs manifest instantly, then take time - and craftsmanship - to crystallise into seaworthy vessels of words and music. The ones on The Confuser largely appeared in hotels, guest houses, and our own Nashville hive over the space of three months.

Nashville musicians learn fast. After a demo session with Jeremy Fetzer at his stylish Fetzicon Lounge, we did an afternoon rehearsal with Eric and Todd at Fortress Eric. That was enough to arrange most of the album, which we then recorded with Brad in two days at Alex The Great Studios. The band learned a couple of songs “Building From The Ruins” and “The Vanishing Kind” in the studio and recorded them on the spot. Those guys are that good.

A few more overdubs, and I played the session to Emma. “It’ll be great,” she said. “If you finesse the vocals. Let’s try my producer Jordan Lehning.” Jordan and Emma between them take no prisoners when it comes to vocal takes. They deploy a level of rigour that I have never attempted to reach, perhaps because I came of age as the tide of punk washed over Britain, and attitude was all that mattered in a voice. Now, nearly 50 years later, I was trying to actually sing properly, at least as well as I could. I’ve always thought of myself as a performer more than a singer. Listening back to this album I am staggered at how well executed my vocals are - it almost sounds like somebody else is the lead vocalist.

Two more garnishing touches. My Nashville chum Gillian Welch came in, with her notebooks, to harmonise, rant and channel her demons on “Ghost In Sunlight”. Also on that track is my old Soft Boys bandmate Kimberley Rew playing guitar. These two guests transform that song into what is probably my favourite track on the album. Kim also adds guitar touches on quite a few other songs. His additions to the string-scape that Fetzer and I set up on our Telecasters make this record into something else.

When the whole boatload of overdubs made its way back to Brad Jones, he took his tweezers to them and lovingly tweaked, pruned and sheared the music into an exquisitely contoured shape, amongst which my voice can canter.

It’s too early for me to assess the songs - that will take another 30 years, by which time I will be long gone - but I can confidently say that The Confuser is the most realised album I have yet made. I have to thank Eric, Jeremy, Todd, Kimberley, Gillian, Brad and Jordan for this; but most of all I have to thank Emma for everything she’s done to bring this one in to land. Thanks, Em - this one’s for you!

You can listen to the album here.

The album is available for purchase here.

Enjoy, y’all - and Happy Confuser Day!