INHERITANCE

There is something uniquely cruel about punishment when nobody tells you what you did.

Inheritance is told from the perspective of the portrait in The Picture of Dorian Gray.

But the portrait does not understand the bargain.

It does not know what the man outside the canvas has done.

It only knows that damage keeps arriving.

“What law have I broken?
What sentence am I serving?”

That is the centre of the song.

The portrait wakes to new evidence.

A change in the mouth.

Something harder behind the eyes.

A mark…

TRAMLINES AND TEETH

Some people are born with safety nets.

Some are born with sharp edges.

Tramlines and Teeth is about two people from the wrong side of the tracks who have learned to survive by refusing to yield.

Not heroes.

Not victims.

Not saints.

Just two difficult, damaged, proud people trying to move through a city that has never made much room for them.

Kat arrives first:

“Rain on the glass of the Twenty Two,
Kat walks on like a match through blue.”

Zero-hours work.

A landlord at the door.

A temper already…

WHITE GLOVES

The cleanest hands are not always innocent.

Sometimes they simply belong to the person who convinced somebody else to do the damage.

White Gloves is the story of Othello told through Iago’s eyes.

Not as a ranting villain.

Not as a man waving a weapon.

As somebody who understands that the most effective form of control is often to alter what another person believes is true.

That is the centre of the song.

“Not with armies
Not with steel
But by deciding what is real.”

Iago does not need to create much.

He…

FAT-CAT DEMOCRACY

There is a particularly effective form of control where the people holding the leash convince you that you are free because you are allowed to choose its colour.

That is where this song started.

Fat-Cat Democracy is about wealth becoming power, power writing the rules, and those rules being presented to everyone underneath as though they arrived naturally.

They did not.

The ladders have missing rungs.

Then we are charged for the privilege of climbing them.

We are told to work harder while wages…