Among my rarely-checked list of friends on Facebook, there's a certain someone who used to stay in the same university accommodation as me - he is now in a blossoming power metal band which recently recorded its first full-length album at a studio in Sweden. Blessed with the massive ego necessary for the genre, he'll frequently post updates about how spectacular the latest thing he's written is or how amazing the recordings are sounding. In comparison, I have a fairly conservative-sized idea of myself and release electronic simulations of the genre to people who I've never met on the Internet - but what I love about his updates is that he has this clear love for what he does and a desire to broadcast that to anyone who will listen.

Therefore:



I love Find You. I had made a couple of attempts to write progressive-length songs before it, but it's the first one that I felt really worked - the seed of the idea came late in 2008 and once I got the track list for the next year together, it was always intended to be the centrepiece of the album, but I hadn't expected it to become quite so special.

After so many individual ideas went into it, everything about it just came together in a way that I'm struggling to replicate now - both inside the song and with the references that it makes back to the ones before it, tying each 'fragment' together with an element and a song title. Even now, there aren't any parts that I feel I should have cut back on or that didn't deserve to make it in. It's my Keeper of the Seven Keys, and for the moment, I believe it to be the best thing I've ever written.

And that's the end of my boasting for today.