‘Touchstone’ is an album all about illuminating musical inspirations. Once Richard had wrapped on its production he gathered together all the scribbled on Post It notes that had been amassed in the studio, the ones that he’d been using to jot the inspirations down (along with some additional thoughts/recollections on the tracks) and produced a ‘users guide to Touchstone’! So, with just one week to go before the album is released, here’s his full inside-track on Touchstone…

Intravenous: This piece of music, which weaves in and out of a genius arpeggio played by Nigel Summers is a nod to ‘On The Run’ by Floyd.. Rather than sync Nigel’s guitar to the bpm of the sequencer, I decided instead to record Nigel’s guitar dry, and sync everything else to it precisely. Great idea in theory – not so great in practice. It took me an entire day to achieve, but the slight changes in tempo throughout the track give it a sense of urgency which I think is difficult to achieve with a static tempo. ‘Intravenous’ was written as a precursor to ‘Twisted Wing’, together they take the album into a tense and darker middle section.

Electric Love: I love uplifting trance music, but find that many tracks these days focus too much on the percussion at the expense of the melodic elements. Rather than adding percussive layers, I created movement and energy with lots of running analogue arpeggiated lines instead. The song is a love song really, it’s about considering how your actions affect others around you, be they lovers or friends. It’s a dreamy trance record. Bill McGruddy (the vocalist) and I spent a day freezing on the south coast of England to make the video in January 2010.

Twisted Wing: The opening line ‘You cannot fly, and every night you dream of scaling heights’ came to me whilst listening to a radio program about an actress in the 50′s now retired. She was describing herself as having ‘dusty wings’, and would relive her nights on stage in her dreams… it was incredibly moving. The lyric suggested a majestic orchestral progression to me set at an energetic pace. I wrote the lyrics with Julie Scott. When she hits those high notes I get goose bumps every time.

Slowmotion: Written with Finland’s finest Dj (and my good friend) Orkidea , ‘Slowmotion’ has undergone many incarnations, rearrangements and remixes. It didn’t make it onto Rain Stars Eternal, it just didn’t work with the rest of the music… but I knew it had a rightful place on Touchstone. The addition of the Édith Piaf sample and the editing gave the track the extra dimension it required for a place on the album. Even though it is much slower than ‘Twisted Wing’ it seems to lift the pace at that point in the record, most bizarre!

The Best Way To Make Your Dreams Come True Is To Wake Up: A very long title, for sure, but as one of my colleagues said “what better than poetry in a title itself”! The title is a direct reference to the French poet Paul Valéry, who coined the phrase. I had fun with some new vocal compression techniques when recording this track, so much so that I tweeted the geekiest tweet of my life, of which I am thoroughly ashamed. I only began to feel comfortable with my own singing voice around the time of ‘Late Summer Fields’. The response from my fans to that track was a real surprise, and it freed me in a sense, to sing the lyrics I was previously writing for other artists. The lyrics in ‘The Best Way’ were a product of my insomnia, when I’m working on music I struggle to sleep properly, in addition, when I recorded the vocal take for this, I had a terrible throat infection, but being the masochist that I am, I thought it would lend the performance a rough ‘edge’.

Zeitgeist: Orkidea and I both love Trance music from the early 90′s for it’s intelligent arrangements, the inclusion of many different parts and the weaving of different textures and elements throughout the tracks. Each time we write together, we assign different parts of a simple melodic progression to different instruments – it’s a ‘question and answer’ mentality. Zeitgeist is a pure club record, its relentless arrangement doesn’t let up for a moment. I fell in love with ‘Yellow Moon’ by Catbird when it appeared on the Solaris International show as a ‘Chillout Moment’ back in 2008, the ‘Fly with Me’ vocal sample was shoe-in for this track.

The Last Defeat (Part Two): As a teenager I loved the way that Genesis would split an epic track into two parts on an album, so I decided to go one step further and save ‘Part Two’ for the next album. It’s one of those little bits of detail which resonate with fans too. Lucia Holm of Sunscreem had long been a heroine of mine, I was delighted when I succeed at coaxing her into writing a vocal for the track. ‘Part One’ was, to my mind. a musical vision of a battlefield when all is quiet and peaceful, but Lucia interpreted it as making love for the first time, I was practically in tears when I heard the song. The Strings, Rhodes and Hammond added some drama to the song as it takes a diversion into the dubby middle section. I edited this down from a mammoth 13 minutes for the ‘Touchstone’ sequence.

There’s A Universe: Musically the combination of electronica and 60′s instrumentation is a pastiche of influences from many great British bands of the last 40 years. Billy and I both sing on this one, spookily we struggled to remember who had sung what when it came to the backing vocals, our voices seem to morph into one. I recorded 16 layers of harmonies for the ‘aah aah’ section, if you listen closely at one point you can hear the telephone ringing in the background. The song itself is an ode to universal love, grabbing it with both hands when it’s there, and savouring the memory when it has gone. After all, as the man said “It’s better to regret something you have done, than to regret something you haven’t done’.