When my good friends in The Aim very kindly invited me to produce some songs for them two years ago, I knew it was going to be eventful but nowhere near as eventful as it's been. In fact, eventful is a mere understatement.
As the world reopened in early 2021, our Thursday night dinner sessions became a weekly highlight; the initial team consisting of Grant Judges, Sam Judges, and the late, great, Jamie Tongue who we suddenly and devastatingly lost in July that year.
In this team, we turned sonic embryos into full blown productions with a couple of laptops, laughed at and mocked each other's ideas to find they actually worked really well, swung microphones from the miniature chandelier when not using a dozen Adidas boxes as a mic stand, tore up the "musical street cred" rule book, cloned ourselves into mass choirs, and churned out track after track until we had 23 songs - amongst dinner, wine, a couple of jam donuts, and a LOT of laughing.
We decided to call it "The Master Reset" very early on - being recorded in the early 20s, we sometimes wish there was a button to restore the world to its factory settings.
Culminating in a thrilling live drum session at The Albion Rooms in Margate with the powerhouse that is Billy Moody, the addition of parts of guitar wizardry courtesy of Peter Sim and his incredible patience with my WeTransfer forgetfulness, the bass legend Henry Green contributing mindblowing musical parts (weirdly enough none of which were on the bass) - plus many more very special guests - it had officially become an Aim album.
On the tail end of last week it was mastered by Jon Astley, a lifelong blesser of my ears with his work with The Who, Level 42, ABBA, Clapton, George Harrison, and that's just scraping the surface. Watching him listen to the mixes was akin to seeing Gordon Ramsay taking a bite of a meal you've made, and for him to be so complimentary and visibly moved by them was a humbling and surreal experience. He worked his magic and turned our collection of songs into a tangible piece of work.
I can't quite believe it's actually completed and ready to unleash to the world. We're hoping to do so around the end of September or early October.
To be tasked with working on Jamie's final recordings, contributions, songs, and art initially seemed like an extremely painful responsibility but turned out to be one of the most comforting things I've ever done. When I press play, it feels like he's still here. And when it's out there, he can live forever. From his contributions in his lifetime to the demos and parts we've unearthed since, he was becoming a force to be reckoned with. His playing, writing, singing and production are the best they've ever been.
I've been lucky enough to work on many albums but this is by far the most significant, diverse, emotional, heartbreaking, joyous, bittersweet, and incredible body of work I've ever been involved in. We've put every drop of our heart and soul into every single note and can't wait for you to hear it.
We'll let you all know when it's en route to the streamings and on the way back from the CD factory. In the meantime, I vehemently encourage you to listen to one of the songs we've done that's out there already. It's about Jamie's lovely mum, written and sung by the man himself, and it's called 'I Know She Knows'. It's a beautiful piece of work x https://youtu.be/CqPVaznrsEk