Happiness Is...
Not Normal · 2026
Happiness Is... releasing your music 15 years after writing and recording it!
2010 was a transitory time in our musical careers, such as they were. After three fun years sporadically gigging mainly the buskers nights of North Tyneside in a band called Canvas (and driving a battered old Ford Transit - 'the Vanvas'), I left university with a useless degree and had to start thinking about real life.
The band drifted apart, and while I had no plans (or desire) to try and make a living out of music, I still got more satisfaction from writing and recording songs than anything else.
In one final desperate attempt to hold out against adult life, I took off to Argentina for a few months. This proved fertile ground for songwriting, and after Col joined me for the final two weeks (including a very memorable trip to Uruguay which inspired 'Running From The Dogs'), we came back and decamped to our tiny home studio in a little box room and wrote and recorded most of this album.
A couple of songs we'd had kicking around for a while, notably 'Dragons', 'Year Of Fire', and 'I Looked Away', but we'd never done anything with them. We also had a few covers, one of which - Can't Find My Way Home by Blind Faith - made it onto the album, others which may appear on future albums...
So, having recorded the album, we... never did anything with them. I'd been persuading Col for a while to release the album, but given we'd recorded everything as complete amateurs, they were very rough and ready, and not all of the songs were up to the standard we hoped for. So we parked them, and got on with life, which has been incredibly busy for both of us, but recently we've started finding more time for music and it was time to finally chuck these songs over the fence.
Col agreed, on one condition - the album wouldn't be the one we'd originally recorded (with a working title of 'Goodbye Uruguay'), but more a greatest hits of all of our songs we'd written and recorded around that time. I'd always envisioned Goodbye Uruguay as a concept album of sorts so I did take a bit of persuasion, but as usual it turned out that Col was absolutely right, so I set about doing what I could to remaster the originals. This was easier said than done - the original mixes weren't great to be honest, and I no longer had access to the project files (following a switch from ProTools to Ableton), and I'm entirely self-taught when it comes to music production.
The final result is a collection of songs that I'm very proud of, despite some questionable drum programming and mixing. But they do what they were intended to do, which is show off our songwriting and Col's singing.
Above, you can find the album on Spotify, and below there are links to each song, including the lyrics. Enjoy!