"Falling Back" was one of the last tracks written for my new album Deep River. I had just come to the end of a relationship and whilst a lot of the songs on the rest of the album expresse the positive side of love, Falling Back taps into the feeling of futility and sadness that often come when love fails.

Another losing hands been played out
Another dream has turned to dust
I'm trying to keep myself believing
It never really meant that much

And I'm falling back
Like a barfly to the bottle
Way down into the black
Yeah I'm falling back
And nothing can touch me
Cause I'm already gone

The lyrics to the first verse and chorus pretty self evidently convey the sense of the wasted hope that I was feeling at the time. I thought I could have been a better version of myself with this person, in this relationship and when it ended there was the sense almost like a reformed drinker going back to the bottle. Back to the old, unfulfilled, defeated version of myself.

The song process for "Falling Back" started, as a great deal of my songs do, with me strumming an acoustic guitar and searching for a melody trying to tap into myself, my inner voice and my emotions. I started to build a melody around the four chord structor of the verse. As I remember it the lyric to the verse came very quickly but I struggled for a while to find the right words/phrase for the chorus. I recorded pretty much all the parts for the song at home with my small recording set up. When you listen to the track it sounds like a fairly simple arrangement but there are quite a lot of different acoustic and electric guitar parts weaving in and out. There is one strumming acoustic playing low down on the neck of the guitar an another playing a high finger picking pattern. I like the way the interplay of the two guitar gives the song an urgent pulse. Also there are three Electric guitars playing on the track. One clean chiming electric supporting the chords of the low acoustic, one slide guitar part that comes in in the second verse and builds in the bridge and also an overdriven guitar on the solo. I am a big Neil Young fan and I love his electric guitar solos, They have a primal, primordial power to them which is more about an emotion and less about musical vertuosity. I did my best to try to summon some of that same passion on this solo.

The middle eight just before the solo is quite dramatic moment in the song and I felt instinctively that I wanted to express the pain and despair I was feeling strongly at that point in this point. I came with this lyric about the 'fields of Eden burning down in flames'. At first I thought the language may be a bit highfalutin and pretentious but I eventually had the courage to go for it and let it stand. My feeling was as long as I could express it with conviction it would work.

I was pleased and surprised when "Falling Back" was chosen to be the second single and that it got play listed on Radio 2 even though I thought it was not the most obvious choice to be a single.

When I have finished writing a song I often forget all the pain and perspiration that has gone into it's creation but the process can be like trying to solve a puzzle. Often a solution presents itself when I decide to get a coffee and stop thinking about it. Inspiration is great but it's just the start of the process.