The album has been around forever, but, like everything else, it changes with the times.

The word itself comes from the Latin album — meaning white — because the first albums were blank, white-slate notice boards in the Forum on which the ancient Romans inscribed public pronouncements.

Because that’s what an album is.

It’s the bringing together of various ideas into a cohesive statement for the world to read.

Or, if not the world, anyone interested enough to have a look, at least.

By somewhere in the spring of 2023 I felt like I had enough songs to inscribe a white slate of my own.

I’d had a concept brewing for a while.

Since I’d broken up with my girlfriend and abandoned my job, I’d found myself in something of a wilderness period.

It had been dark, disorienting, and full of more late nights and bad decisions than I care to remember.

I tried — consciously or not — to find ways of refracting that lost soul into the songs on the album. Creating versions of him that both are and aren’t quite me.

Take Isabella — a lonely dramatic monologue about the last man standing at the bar and the tired barmaid forced to listen to him.

One More Night — a confessional about a forbidden love affair, never meant to last.

Or A Girl I Know:

“It was early June when I escaped her room
with something like a sermon in my ears.
I had to wait at a golden gate,
just praying for the sun to disappear.
It was 5am on a brand new day
and there was no chance I’d be sleeping for a while…”

You get the picture.

The ancient Roman idea of a white slate slowly evolved through the centuries.

By the eighteenth century, the word album had come to refer to a book of collected items — pressed flowers, drawings, early photographs, poems.

A curated gathering of fragments.

A time capsule of memories.

That’s what Stars feels like to me, now that I’m a year or two ahead of the man I was when I wrote it.

When we look up and see the stars themselves, we’re really looking back in time.

Starlight drifts across the void, carrying old stories with it.

Light from The Pleiades — “the seven sisters in the late night show” the narrator hears singing in Isabella — takes about 450 years to reach us here on earth.

When we look at them, we’re receiving photons forged while Shakespeare was still writing Romeo and Juliet, drifting toward us through the centuries.

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life…

Shakespeare's tragedy reminds us that personal chaos can give birth to a sort of resolution.

My own personal chaos feels much more manageable now.

But, of course, as we all know, the only constant in life is change.

The album began to change again in the early 20th century.

Three-minute shellac records — the precursor material to vinyl, fragile enough to shatter when dropped — would be compiled in booklets, forming collections of songs on individual disks.

Suddenly, listeners became aware of sequence and structure, and how this could affect the listening experience.

In 1948, in the embers of global war, Columbia Records released the first LP — Mendelssohn’s violin concerto in E minor.

Now that sequence could be held on a single vinyl record.

Because sequence is important.

A human life is a story that unfolds, chapter by chapter.

Like all albums, Stars became a way of sequencing chaos — deciding what the story was, and in what order it should be told.

It took me a couple of years to get that right.

Its closing song — If It Just Takes Time — is one of my favourites on there.

Because important things often do.

Starlight, according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, has a very different relationship with time.

From the perspective of a photon, moving at the edge of the universe’s speed limit, time ceases to exist.

To a photon of starlight, emission and absorption are the same event.

Not so in music.

What you’re hearing on Stars is the story of a dark night of the soul, shining at you from the near-distant past.

For me, hopefully, it’s just the beginning.

Thanks for staying tuned.

Keep dreaming,

Rob