This album was entirely recorded on a shoebox-style cassette recorder from the 1980s, with the cassette audio being ripped to Audacity and cleaned up and mixed a little bit with some heavy compression and EQ. I also played a cheap 1950s-style parlour guitar on every song. The result was a very raw, slightly distorted 'lo-fi' sound that I was very pleased with! I broke from my usual habit of writing songs that were quite basic musically and told fictional stories - certainly 'Other', 'Him' and 'You' were autobiographical lyrically, and I made an effort to go beyond the most basic open chord voicings common with folk music. I composed and mixed every song on this record myself. Once again I was also responsible for the photography and design of the cover art - a scan of a Polaroid instant photograph of me from a few years prior, in-keeping with the shabby, vintage feel of the music.
This album was my first real musical effort beyond writing the odd song. I'd done a very brief session at Parlour Studios in Kettering, Northamptonshire a year or so before, but I wasn't fully pleased with my performance on the few songs I did there. Ultimately, I decided to rewrite a couple of the songs I recorded that day and record them myself, alongside some new material and one traditional folk tune - the infamous 'In The Pines'. I recorded and mixed every track myself on an 8-track TASCAM Portastudio, inspired by Bruce Springsteen's use of an '80s-era TASCAM machine for the recording of his 'Nebraska' album - a major influence on my music. I was also responsible for the photography and design of the cover art.
I was pleased with how this record turned out in the end, although I did feel that the sound was a little too slick and polished for some of the material. I rectified this with my next EP, 'Joe Harley II'.