Album Notes

‘Graffiti’ is a collection of Nathan Timothy’s most personal songs to date. Building on the popularity of songs like “Eternity” and “Heart” from his debut album ‘Corrections’ Nathan decided to attempt to record an album centered around his favourite instrument, the piano. Inspired by great writers like Burt Bacharach, Brian Wilson, Ben Folds and Howard Jones, Nathan wanted to put together an album that “could have been recorded yesterday, but may have been recorded in the 70’s!”

The recording process was turned upside down for this project. “It was really important for me to know the songs worked with just piano and vocal, so I decided to record those bits first. Gary(Ryan) and I spent a day in the studio recording take after take of the songs until we were happy. I then spent the remaining studio time adding drums, bass, the odd bit of trumpet...Sarah Freestone put together the string arrangements and I have to say listening to the quartet playing them for the first time in the studio was pretty amazing. Sarah’s an incredible musician and she was heavily pregnant at the time too with twins! I don’t know how she did it...”

Nathan continues, “We did a mix of the album pretty quickly after the sessions and in retrospect I should have taken a break before we did this. Sometimes you can be too close to a record and you get lost in it...it makes sense to let someone else mix it who hasn’t had anything to do with the recording or writing process.”

A year later Robbie Bronnimann got in touch and offered to re-mix/ re-produce the album. This was even more incredible for Nathan as Robbie does a huge amount of work for Howard Jones and really understood what he was trying to achieve. “He spent a month ‘fine tuning’ the performances... most of the vocals were recorded in my cupboard at home and it showed! He then added his production magic. I think the result is very moving. I’ve got an album of ten songs that sound like they belong together.”