Easily my favourite track on the album. This was a real forced number at the start of it's life; I was well behind my song quota (5 finished on the 23rd... time to worry) and I needed to knock something out at least. Something clicked about an…

This is the end of the journey. It's time to maybe think and reflect about some of the things we heard and then forget we ever heard them.

Why this represents 1993 is really quite a mystery to myself. I was 2 years old, so I've no idea why it strikes me as such a dark and mysterious year. I think I managed to get down exactly what I was thinking with this track.

The scene setter. This was the first track on the album and I've still got mixed feelings about it. Audibly, I like it. Cohesively, it doesn't REALLY fit in... My girlfriend told me "like it needs to represent the rest of the album. It grabs your…

There are too many amazing quotes from this film to not sample them SOMEWHERE in my album. Time after time, the 'yo-yo master' line got me laughing, so I thought I'd pay homage to it.

I would make the 70's sound more like this.

I'd be lying if I said this entire track wasn't sparked by the opening audio clip. It really made me think about the ways some people create their own enjoyment. Cool.

A bit less percussion and a bit more rhythm was the idea for this. I say that, but the track had a fully formed drum track alongside it until right at the last when I discarded it in a fit of creative temperament.

This track is the introduction to the main bulk of the album. It says "WELCOME TO RPM '09" and doesn't let you go until you've gotten to "Dancing With The Midnight Waves", the penultimate track.

Musical tribute to the ideas of Jane Jacobs (author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities) and Christopher Alexander (author of The Timeless Way of Building).

I am concerned with the values of my generation.

Original working title was something like, "And after six years I finally understood why they sing in the streets here, and could go home." It's sort of about anonymity in the modern city. If that sounds pretentious, that's because it is.

Good old dulcimer bash-up. This is certainly the most aggressive song I've played on dulcimer. I'm sure all those people with solid-body electric dulcimers have done worse...

I'm going to get all pretentious again and say this one is about the concerning strain of what I might call "religious modernist traditionalism" espoused by technological singularity fanatics (Ray Kurzweil) and authors like Neil Stephenson.

This song was recorded illegally. Please don't rat us out.

Started recording this with no idea what to do with the sound. Wound up with three different vocal takes to choose from, didn't like any of them, used all of them.

through the dead branches, through the dead branches

I (Al) wrote this song way back, just before the start of the current Iraq war. But it comes back to my mind every time a politician utters words matching a regex something like /(capture and )?kill (Osama )?Bin Laden/. It happened to be Obama…