Hello everyone!
I'm delighted to announce my new single, ‘Snowdrops’, which is available from today at my Bandcamp page and all worldwide streaming services including Spotify.
‘Snowdrops’ is a charity single, and all proceeds will be donated to the Intercom Trust, an organisation I was previously involved with, which works to make the South West a place where LGBT+ people are respected, celebrated, and able to live with real equality. The charity, its work, and my involvement with it relate directly to the themes of the song.
‘Snowdrops’ is a deeply personal song for me. It deals with mental health and recovery, and marks another step towards my aim of complete transparency about my experiences and feelings in my music—even if it feels a little uncomfortable at times to put myself so vulnerably “out there”.
The song takes its name from the first flowers to bloom after winter, and reflects on a nervous breakdown I had in 1999, when I was eighteen, following my first serious relationship.
Growing up in rural Devon in the late 1990s—a relatively homophobic place at that time—I fell for another young man who was struggling with his sexuality, his mental health, and sustained homophobic bullying. His own collapse—and the end of our relationship shortly afterwards—precipitated my own, and in the early spring of that year I was admitted to a psychiatric ward at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital.
The story in ‘Snowdrops’ is drawn from a section of my as-yet-unpublished memoir about that period of my life. A few days after being discharged, I was driving through North Devon with friends when I experienced an epiphany that changed everything:
"A song came on the radio which felt like it had been written for me. The words—about pulling through, about not giving up, about having the music in you—reached right out of the radio and into my heart. In that moment I realised how foolish I’d been to risk everything—my art, my very life—for a boy. I realised that I simply had to get better."
It marked a turning point in my life: the moment I became committed to being an artist. Over the following weeks, music—and the desire to live—slowly came back:
"Over the course of a few weeks, the lights in my life started turning on again. I picked up my diary for the first time in over six months. I started writing music again. Life felt… well, if not brilliant, at least okay. Like it was worth living for. And that was enough."
‘Snowdrops’ is the first single from my next album, due out either late this year or early next year.
All proceeds from the single will go to the Intercom Trust, a charity that works with exactly the same kinds of vulnerable LGBTQ+ people that I once was. After my breakdown, I volunteered for the organisation for over a year, and that involvement—and having something to contribute to, something to put my back into—was a key part of my recovery. Its work is still close to my heart.
You can read more about my time working for the organisation in an extract from my memoir here, and more about the current organisation here.
You can hear ‘Snowdrops’ at my Bandcamp page and all streaming services.
Also, a quick reminder that if you'd like to hear it live, along with many other songs, we'll be heading out to perform two shows in just over a week: in Holt, Norfolk, on Saturday 18 April, and in Manchester on Sunday 19 April. Tickets for both of those shows can be found here.
Thank you for reading, and please give generously!
XXD