I taught in New South Wales public schools from 1978-2015 - it was a rewarding, exhausting, challenging, exhilarating, frustrating and memorable career. At various times in those nearly 40 years I was a classroom teacher, school executive, sports coach, librarian and principal. Every job rewarded the effort you were prepared to put into it. I was very pleased to have retired by the time Covid came around but I saw how incredibly hard my daughter and son-in-law worked during this time. Politicians, businesses and media paid lip service to teachers (and nurses, aged care workers, police and other frontline services) but very few called for better wages, increased staffing or improved working conditions for these heroic service providers. When the worst of Covid was over the NSW Teachers Federation was negotiating a new teaching award and the NSW State Government strongly opposed wage increases, staffing increases and better disability support - a 'Thank You' was considered sufficient. The NSW Teachers Federation ran a campaign called 'MoreThan Thanks' and this inspired my song. PS The picture is me singing with my class at Ben Venue PS in 1995more

- Mastered by Mixeamore

Built This Way is a dark fantasy introspective, dealing with feelings of uncontrollable malice that force actions without remorse and conceptually was written from the point of view of a serial killer. I know, right? We started this one as a joke and from there it blossomed into a rhythmically bouncy, swinging walk through the mind of a dangerous, narcissistic and callous psychopath. It's fun! Phil came up with the structure, playing minor chords in a 6/8 swing, switching to major chords to lift us up, and then dropping us back down to the verse. It was a cool sort of walking feel with a fun scariness to it that, before it even had words, we knew was dark. So we made it dark. Lyrically I tried to keep this one pretty much on the nose and leaned in to a murderer's perspective as much as possible with the bridge having him accomplish his goal and move on to strike another day, all peppered with influences from my own life. That's how we wrote, most of the time, with me writing the first lyrics because it was my phone that I was writing everything on, so it was with me, and I always had the newest version that I just edited. I'm pointing this out because this caused me to be the one to really know the lyrics, and be able to sing, for the longest time in our writing. For most of our writing he'd build the house and I'd decorate. We put a light, mellow bridge near the end to give a sense of peace, tonally, while lyrically being completely nonchalant about its intense evil. Production went quickly on this track in studio with everything coming together perfectly and this was the first song I considered finished, with it's disturbing yet strangely inviting tone, roiling around a sinister edge. Vocally I originally wanted to have layers of other voices singing at the same time, alluding to the voices in the head of the singer, but I completely forgot about it until just this moment. Huh. Too late now! This is the only song on the album in 6/8 time, which gives it a unique flavour transition to the more rock leaning part of the album. It's dark, it's kinda scary and it's fun.more