Steve Mason in Worthing: searching for "a more uplifted spiritual place"

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It’s absolutely not an album about Covid, but it is significant that it is Steve's first one after the Covid pandemic: “I spent most of Covid trying to get it together and trying to write something that meant something to me and that helped pull my mind into a more uplifted spiritual place. I think everyone struggled but certainly artists are generally quite sensitive in the way that they do realise they need to have some form of stability in order to be creative. It took a while to get my head around the whole thing and then to build up some kind of routine. Artists like to think they don't need routines but we do! I was trying to build something and I suppose I was looking for some form of spirituality but not something attached to organised religion.

"And yes. I think I found it. I think it was a mixture of human spirit and listening to some old songs, some gospel songs and just listening to the content of those songs and the power behind them. And even as a non-religious person I could find something comforting about those words. And I suppose I was trying to make something that was more distilled and perhaps a bit clearer than maybe I would usually do. It felt like there was more need in that kind of situation for some form of clarity because it felt like everything had been thrown in the air and the pieces had just landed but not necessarily where they were before. I felt I wanted that clarity.

“Inevitably when you get something as insane as the pandemic then everybody wants to move as far away as possible as quickly as possible and I think the thing is that you just never really deal with what happened. It is like that thing of ‘If we all keep walking, we will be fine!’ but unfortunately the human brain does not work like that and I think we're seeing the facts of it all in the behaviour of young children who missed out on so much, and I think a more humane society would put people in place to support those children.

“But writing the album I was keenly aware of the fact that nobody was going to want to listen to an album about Covid, not least myself. It is not an album about Covid. It's about human beings trying to find the right path. We're all looking for these things and we all deal with these things in our lives in different ways and I think that's what this album is looking at.

“I guess things now have been back to normal for a little while, at least a year. It's hard to remember and I don't think things are really different now as a musician. But actually I am reaching an age where you do start appreciating things more anyway as you get a bit older. You realise you've been doing this for a quarter of a century and you just feel incredibly lucky.

"And that just makes me work harder and really want to push myself forward because you just so feel so privileged to be able to call yourself an artist. You owe it yourself and you owe to the people that buy your stuff and you owe it to all the people that have gone before.”​