Hello! Time flies when you’re recording an album. As we wait for a break between downpours of rain, aeroplanes, neighbourhood powertools and squarks from nesting crows, this seems like a good time to give you an update on our album-in-progress. We’re writing this post together, so we’ll start each paragraph with an initial so you know who’s speaking.

A: I’ve been enjoying the puzzle-solving nature of lyric writing. It’s a buzz when the right word falls (or is pushed) into place. Spinster’s Delight (a working title) was the most difficult song. Not many words rhyme with ‘spinster’ – I eventually decided that ‘I convinced her’ worked best. In the same song, I felt I’d reached a career milestone in having the slang word ‘khyber’ in a song, to rhyme with ‘moral fibre’. In Come To Our Party, I’d written two verses with ‘or’ sounds and wanted to keep the pattern in the other verse, but I was stumped! Then I remembered that I hadn’t plumbed the shallows of my foreign-language knowledge. Good old ‘por favor’ saved the day, and I threw in ‘respondez s’il vous plait’ to boot.

B: Here’s a little something I whipped up whilst testing a new mic position. Some steel string Faux Flamenco if you will …and I did, so you might as well, as well! You can hear a little distortion as I check to hear how close I can get to the mic before peaking. You don’t wanna peak too soon they say, and it doesn’t until later in the piece, so all good there. I couldn’t resist adding some keyboard as well. Whilst listening, think pathos, self belief and joy of the heart.

A: There’s a 15-second “laaaah” on Ooh La La Lah, so I’ve headed back to Bikram yoga. When I was diligently attending classes many months ago, I discovered that it gave me more singing stamina. It’s sweaty and overwhelming and gruelling, but it delivers the goods. I’ve recorded that vocal now, but there’ll be no slacking off for me because I’ll need to sing it at our shows very soon!

B: Summer Love will definitely have birds chirping on it. They were very chirpy one day whilst I was recording guitar, and since the song is about Summer I think it will be fitting to hear them at the beginning. This made me wonder what other albums have unintentional incidental sounds on them. At the end of David Bowie’s Life On Mars you can hear a telephone ring and the pianist (Rick Wakeman, I believe) stops playing. I’ve always wondered if that was planned, but I assume it was just something that happened and they deliberately left it in. Do you know any other examples?