1. I Can Love You From Here

This song is me speaking directly to Liberty. It is a song that considers what we can do with the love we have for someone we have lost. It is something that I had actually been thinking about for a while, although for different reasons, and then Liberty died. It became immediately important to me that I solve the problem of what to do with all the love I had and felt for her. A new mother is utterly consumed with love and protection. A new mother who has lost her child has nowhere to direct that love. I wrote this song to direct all of my love to Liberty, every day, wherever she may be.

2. Saving Up For A Rainy Day

When a terrible trauma takes place, you may find that some of the people you would have expected to be there to support you find that, for whatever reason, they can’t. This is pretty hard. However, it is also the case that there are people around you who you didn’t know could be supportive and loving and helpful, kind of step forward from the shadows and offer you a greater love and friendship than you would ever have anticipated possible. This is an amazing thing to experience and I had many friends and colleagues who did this for me.

I dedicate this song to my best friend Sam. We were already close friends and I would never have doubted her ability to support me in times of trouble. However, our friendship took on a new dimension after Liberty died. She herself had a three month old baby and yet she never once faltered in her support, love and understanding of me. Often she understood me better than I did myself. I wish everyone could have a friend as strong and true as Sam.

I wrote this song in 2012 on a writing trip to Nashville and I wrote it with a brilliant singer/songwriter called David Mead. He is really a brilliant writer, in fact John Mayer once said that he was one of his favourite singer/songwriters’!

3. Rocket Science

I wrote this song over a 10 year period! Not a creative process I would recommend to anyone, but certainly an interesting one that I learnt a lot from. I basically didn’t know what I was talking about when I first wrote it because it is about love, but it is particularly about how we make love last. How can we continue to love our partner when life gets hard (as it always does in one way or another).

You may or may not know that a very high percentage of couples who lose children break up. This makes perfect sense to me. Imagine trying to manage the complexity of any relationship and then with a grieving process, often with two very complex grieving processes thrown into the mix. I am very proud that Alessandro and I have managed to stay together but it has certainly been hard for both of us and that’s what the song is about. It is the most challenging thing I’ve worked on and continue to work on every day to keep my marriage in one piece, but also the thing of which I am most proud. That’s what this song is about.

4. My Little Men

Cosmo and Rocco are my 6 and 4 year old boys. They are adorable and exhausting and never shut up. I try my best for them and I think a lot about the world they are growing up in and the particular challenge they face as boys and then men. They are both very interested in this whole record project and love Liberty’s song. It has facilitated some very good conversations about Liberty and plenty of tears and open conversations about big things. They can handle it.

Like the parent of most boys, I am especially affected by thinking about the past and the wars we have fought or wars we may fight again. Last remembrance day was a big one and my boys wanted to wear poppies and asked me what it meant.

Everything I want for my boys is contained in this song. I want them to be happy and have the opportunity to love whoever they want to love openly. I want them to work to understand everyone as equals and not to take on the weight of the world just because they are male. I do not care what they do, other than that. I have learnt a lot about expectations and how little they mean. I want them to live each day as it comes and love themselves and others.

I wrote this song with my other best friend and brilliant songwriter Jonathan Whiskerd who is also the boys ‘godfather’. (more in the music mafia sense than the religious sense).