Always In My Heart is a touching personal journey through grief and anger to love and acceptance.
The album was conceived when I found myself in a completely new place of grieving having lost my brother-in-law then my Dad and my mother-in-law in less than a year. It felt like a cascade of grief set against a backdrop of unforeseen conflict. So I started to write it down. I turned to music and songwriting to try and make sense of the overwhelming feelings and process some of the loss. Another huge emotional blow of losing my dog Chili 18 months later, my best friend and steadfast companion, forced me to dig even deeper and reevaluate; seeing if I could find some more words where none seemed enough. 
These were dark times indeed, I wrote at least 29 songs going through emotions I couldn’t fully comprehend, but gradually passing through the grief and anger to a place of love and acceptance.  This album shows some of the grief, much of the acceptance, lots of the love and current conclusion, but hopefully none of the anger. That will remain in the vault indefinitely… 
Having taken around two years to complete, the album evolved with me.  Indeed some of the songs are not even about that initial difficult period, but about other matters entirely as we face strange and unsettling times around the globe.  Finally finished during the Covid19 Lockdown, the album has also taken on new and different meanings and framed a shared experience of loss, uncertainty and human connections for listeners.
Lockdown also meant I couldn’t have a live violinist or extra backing vocals, and that I had to swiftly learn to mix and master the album myself!

This album is for my family and is dedicated to my Dad. The subject matter is very much about family, but it’s also about life an love in a wider sense. Some of the songs relate in some way to real events, some are imagined. There are songs about futility and hope, exhaustion and strength, peace and battles. In some of the songs every word is considered, others just fell out of my head in a matter of minutes. A surprising number of the songs started to be about one thing then turned into another. A bit like painting a picture where you start with one idea and at some point you step back and it’s not what you thought, but you look at it like it’s not even yours and just decide you like it, so it’s staying.

Despite being very personal, there’s very little in this album that other people haven’t experienced or won’t experience at some point, so I’m putting this out with love and compassion to anyone that listens to it and particularly anyone that understands it.