It was the first year I lived in Manchester, and I stayed here for work during the festive season. I had written plenty of songs before, but the two songs flowed out of me over this time.

I wrote “ground zero” just before Christmas Day. It’s a song about society, and the mundane aspects of it; the day-to-day, the routine, the usual stuff that comes up. Often when you try and live your life in a way that isn’t so mundane, more spontaneous, it can be a lot of hassle and it’s much easier to not have to deal with it. The life of a creative can be chaotic and messy and too much sometimes!

For the other single, I remember writing it on Boxing Day. I’d just spent the past few days on my own and it came out so smoothly. The title is the same as a Sleater-Kinney song, who I’d been listening to a lot at the time; it’s a contrast to the former track, wanting something more and yearning for chaos. Creativity and chaos often go hand-in-hand. I really think it’s a big part of it all - it’s all about getting older, and wanting the fast pace of a younger life.

Back in the 90s, the idea of writing a “holiday song”, or actually a “holiday hit” (no need to be modest here, that was what we were aiming for) was a fixed idea of Peter, our guitar player back then. I always had trouble with this idea, since whereas I understood the intention - hey, let’s write a song that people associate with certain holidays and that will thus be played again and again - I had trouble with the notion that it was the band who would have a choice in that.

Okay, if you write a song about Christmas, for example, you’re pretty much giving a broad hint. But I was (still am) not sure whether such a hint is necessary for a song to be chosen by the listeners as their holiday song. What I personally don’t really like about the whole approach is that as a band, you set out to write a song for your audience; even more, you expect the audience to associate that song with a special occasion in their lives.

Like many bands that claim to write their music for the fans, for me, this is a somewhat presumptuous attitude. Yes, it is a beautiful thing if a certain song can be connected to a specific event in one’s life; but at least for me, the bands who wrote those songs did not choose the moments or the events that created this association. In other words, shouldn’t we as a band stick to what we do best - create music that we enjoy - and then spread that joy? That being said, of course I tried to write a “holiday hit” back in the 90s - and no, it did not become a holiday hit.

Perhaps because I could not help it and developed it into something personal, because our original idea of just singing about how “everything was fine because the sun did shine” was so awfully shallow that I just couldn’t identify with it. But, I did actually feel fine during that time, mostly because I had just gotten out of what nowadays psychologists would call a toxic, unbalanced relationship, and I put that in the lyrics of the stanzas: “I don’t care what you are doing, I don’t care what you are saying, I don’t care about you at all! You won’t change my smile today, you won’t break my heart today, because I don’t care about you anymore.”

With this introduction, the chorus of “Today I’m fine just as the sun does brightly shine” did get a deeper, personal meaning, and the song felt right. Nevertheless, the song back then was only released on a demo. Only this year, more than 20 years after its composition, it was released properly, and it is called “Time to Say Goodbye”. Please enjoy it – especially during the holiday season?