If you get triggered by discussions of mental health, you might want to skip today's blog post. I got a letter summarising the findings of the recent assessment interviews I had, and the tl;dr is that at the moment I'm not doing very well at all.

I'm writing this blog post because I want you to know that if you're struggling with issues at the moment, you shouldn't be afraid to seek help. I've lost more than one close family member who took their own life because they didn't get the assistance they needed in time. That was completely unacceptable to me when it happened, and the outrage I feel these days, particularly when I read Wes Streeting's many misguided pronouncements on mental health, is difficult to put into words; the man's an asshole. There's enough stigma attached to being open and candid about your mental health around as it is, and he's making it worse. That has to change. Folks, if you find that your emotional well-being is poor enough to be affecting your day-to-day life, don't just grit your teeth and suffer, because that's just bullshit. You don't deserve to be going through that. Talk to your GP, because they will put you in touch with professional helpers who can put you on the road to recovery. And I promise you: doing so is not at all scary. You'll be talking to compassionate professionals whose end goal is to get you feeling better. They're kind and supportive. The assessment process is straightforward, and I didn't find it at all stressful or disturbing.

I was asked questions from a series of diagnostic forms which are used to identify what's going on with people who are reporting difficulties in their day-to-day life. The first of these forms was the PTSD check list, or PCL-5. The minimum PCL-5 score indicating that someone is having difficulties dealing with past traumatic events which "would benefit from psychological support" is 33 (the maximum possible score is 80).

I scored 59. Oops.

The next form I completed was the Patient Health Questionnaire, or PHQ-9. This is a diagnostic tool used to identify people who are suffering from anxiety and/or depression. A score of 15 or more (the maximum possible score you can get is 27) indicates that the patient has a severe case of the condition. My PHQ-9 score was 20, which was enough to throw up an "immediate treatment required" flag. Oops again.

The final questionnaire I was given was the General Anxiety Disorder GAD-7. My GAD-7 score was 19 out of a maximum of 27, "indicating severe symptoms of depression and anxiety." Oops one more time.

The doctor's comment was "those are pretty big numbers" so while the degree to which I'm suffering is bad news, what's wrong with me has shifted from being "just a bit down at the moment" to something being taken very seriously by health professionals. That's a good thing, and as a result I'm now in the pipeline waiting for treatment, but the waiting list for the first of the courses I'll be placed on is 11 weeks and the other is 17 weeks.

I've found all of this reassuring, in a way. It's shown me that I wasn't imagining things or being a hypochondriac in thinking that I was ill. It turns out I am ill, and quite seriously so, and instead of just toughing it out (which is what I've been doing for most of the last thirty years) I have finally started the process of getting treatment. I'm looking forward to working with people who can do something to help me, but until that happens I'm going to have to cut back the amount of things I'm taking on that are any more challenging than just looking after my immediate physical needs each day. I just don't have the spoons for anything more complicated than that right now.

I'm having a rough week this week.

Thanks to the complex PTSD I've had since I was a kid, I still suffer dreadfully from anxiety dreams and nightmares and I had a particularly bad set of those on Monday night involving my father. Then to add to the fun, I had a dream about my ex-wife which set off my rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD) about as badly as it ever has. I woke up on Tuesday morning feeling utterly, absolutely wretched. If the RSD flares up like this, it can be relied upon to completely knock me flat and so I was in exactly the sort of frame of mind which when I have a mental health assessment will always trigger questions about whether I'm experiencing suicidal ideation or wishing I was dead.

Guess what? I had a phone appointment for a mental health assessment first thing on Tuesday morning, so when I was duly asked both of those questions I had to give an honest yes to both of them—because I'm not exaggerating when I say that I'm really not in a good place right now. I'm feeling really low: socially isolated and lonely, and I'm in quite a lot of pain. As I talked to the assessor I realised that I really haven't been looking after myself very well all year. I'd already figured out that I'm seriously depressed at the moment but it's nice to be validated, I guess?

I felt completely drained afterwards and spent most of the rest of the day back under my duvet. Today I'm trying to give myself the time (and space) to let my batteries recharge before I get round to doing much of anything else.

The assessment was part of the process for getting on the waiting list for counselling and therapy and not surprisingly I aced the interview (and no, that's not something to feel good about). But I'm now on the waiting list, which is a positive outcome. Another positive thing is that (much to my surprise) since Saturday, my sleep scores haven't dropped lower than 92. And I've been losing weight, too. I'm not going to look too closely at why that is, I'm just going to take the win.

The daft thing about all this is that I have a whole bunch of recording sessions coming up in the next few weeks. Given that I'll be doing exactly the sort of stuff I really enjoy, I ought to be getting excited about them...

To distract myself from all of the above, I've been reading a lot. This has mainly happened in the bath; I am really appreciating the new bathroom now that it's been completed and I can soak for more than an hour at a time without the water getting cold. As you'll see from my Books read in 2026 page, I'm now ahead of things for achieving my annual goal of reading sixty books by the end of the year.

Last night I had the best night's sleep I've managed since January, with my watch giving me a score of 99. I'm sure that the reduction in stress resulting from getting last week's hospital appointment out of the way was a major contributing factor in this but I suspect that it was mainly the result of smothering myself in Ibuprofen gel before I turned in for the night. The two glasses of Merlot that I had with my dinner probably helped matters as well. I don't remember waking up once during the night, and that's not just highly unusual these days; it never happens.

The older I get, the more difficult I find it is to switch off and just relax. It feels like I shouldn't be allowed to, that I'm being lazy if I take any time to be utterly and completely nonproductive. I know full well that these feelings are fallout from the way my father treated me. His values were obsessively rooted in the Victorian work ethic he'd been brought up to believe in by his parents. For him, if you weren't keeping yourself busy for every waking hour of the day, you were a lazy, worthless slob who deserved no support whatsoever from him. If you weren't "making an effort" then all you were good for was being thrown out on the street (and yes, I mean that literally; he threatened to do that more than once). It's been more than forty years since I finally moved out (on my own terms) and started to lead a life of my own but I still have to stop and remind myself that pushing myself to do stuff all the time makes me ill. This week, I realised that I'd forgotten once again that actually, it's totally reasonable and acceptable to let myself take a break and make some time to just chill. I'm sure that even "normal" people sometimes struggle with doing that, but when you're Autistic, it's incredibly difficult—right up to that moment when you reach meltdown and doing anything at all becomes impossible.

Yesterday afternoon, I fired up my home studio to work on the next album but then realised that I was completely lacking enthusiasm of any kind for what I was doing. I'd had to force myself just to get to the point in my work process where I open Ableton to load a set. That's a really stupid place to be in if you're trying to be productive, let alone do work that stands any chance of being creative or original, so I switched everything back off again, ensconced myself on my favourite spot on the sofa, and ate pizza while I watched some Blu-Rays instead. Good call.

I have plenty of time to get the album finished, after all; the next Bandcamp Friday takes place in May.

I know I'm beginning to sound like a broken record at this point but apart from anything else, I feel completely exhausted right now. Last month was pretty full-on, cognitively and emotionally speaking (as FAWM always is) and until Friday, I really hadn't switched off for a good six weeks straight. That might have been something I could do without having to pay the price when I was younger, but these days I know that there's going to be a cost. While I've somehow managed to survive to the grand old age of 65, I've never been particularly resilient and I'm much less robust these days than I used to be. I need to look after myself better than I have been doing; if last night is an example of the benefits of easing up on the gas pedal for a while, then I'm all for it.

I was shocked to hear today that Motörhead's longest-serving guitarist has passed away at the age of 64. He'd been in intensive care following complications after recent surgery. His passing just leaves Mikkey Dee, Lucas Fox, Pete Gill, and Brian Robertson as the band's surviving members. He was a popular figure, and my social media feed this afternoon has been filled with tributes to him.

I try not to get maudlin about such things, but at my age you really notice how the number of musicians who played a part in your sonic upbringing and who are still around is getting smaller and smaller. It hits home particularly hard when the ones leaving us are younger than me, as Phil was.

Yesterday I had a follow-up consultation at the urology department of Cheltenham General Hospital to see how I was getting on with the kidney and gall stones I'm suffering from. It had been five years, eleven months and ten days since I last spoke to the Urologist. Back when I was a kid, going through this process would have taken most of the day and I still find myself planning for that, but yesterday I was in and out in less than 30 minutes, and that included having x-rays taken. It doesn't look like things have got any worse and the discomfort is (mostly) manageable so we decided that "let's not poke the bear" was the best course of action unless things deteriorate further.

But over the couple of days preceding my appointment, the prospect of a hospital visit had pushed me into full-on overwhelm. My experiences of such things as a small child are partly responsible for the complex PTSD that I suffer from, and I had a massive flare on Sunday night. So much for my confident claim that these days I'd got things sussed out; I seem to follow a pattern that if I do manage to get a good night's sleep (as I mentioned last time that I did on Saturday night) the following night will always extract payment. It did, and it was brutal. I could not think straight. The slightest task became too much to deal with. I was pretty much frozen, cognitively speaking. Thanks, brain.

I've calmed down significantly today, but I still feel drained. Going for a walk in the sunshine earlier helped a little bit, but the mental fog is still lingering thickly.

Helen's response was on point, as always: "OMG man, you’ve got to give yourself a rest!" so I will be attempting to do just that for the next week. The FAWM website will close on Sunday, which should help matters; I've left more than 700 comments on other people's work, which exceeded the target I'd set myself, but aside from keeping an eye on the asshole "SEO specialist" from Lucknow who keeps creating accounts to promote dodgy one-man-job businesses in the United States (and I will continue to suspend every profile he sets up until we can block him at source) I'm not really doing much there any more. This afternoon I will be tackling the pile of laundry which has been sitting on one of the armchairs in the living room for the past week, and then er, that's about it. I'm done adulting for a while.

The FAWM website has been very quiet this weekend; I suspect that most people taking part have moved on to other things. Burr tells me that commenting has died away even more rapidly than it did last year (and this always makes me laugh, because in the last week of February the forums are full of people saying how they're all going to stick around and comment on other people's work right up until everything goes back into hibernation). Even the number of spammers that are signing up to the site seems to have tailed off. This means I've stopped obsessively checking things every hour to make sure discussions haven't gone off the rails or that nobody's spammed the chat. And as a result, I can feel myself relaxing. I hadn't realised how wound up it was making me. Trying to do more than I am comfortable with really does not work for me any more; quite honestly it never did, even back when I had a job. Back then, I had no idea why I couldn't cope or why I ended up feeling so swamped so often. None of my colleagues seemed to suffer like I did.

Since discovering that I'm Autistic, I've become extremely mindful of how easily I become overwhelmed. Back when I was working, I would force myself to keep going and I would only notice that I was having problems at the point where they had already become too much to cope with, and I would completely shut down. By ignoring the situation, I made myself ill to the point where I was on antidepressants for ten years. It took me several years after I left my last job before I began to feel like I was back on anything resembling an even keel. I still find life extremely challenging these days, and I've learned that I have to be firm about how much of it I can manage on any given day. Even now, if I do end up getting overwhelmed again, it will take weeks for me to recover.

These days I understand the process and I can usually recognise when something is starting to become a problem and do something about it. That has really helped to preserve my quality of life and my mental wellbeing. For the past few days, I've been aware that I was getting close to being overwhelmed again. It doesn't take very much to get me into such a state these days, and I'm sure that the sort of things that make it worse for me would be laughable to any normal person, but nowadays I know I'm not a normal person. For me, they can reduce me to a nervous, distracted, shaking wreck. Nowadays, though, I can respond accordingly. So after I'd finished doing my music directory housekeeping yesterday afternoon, I shut down the computer and slobbed out in front of the TV to watch some episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Afterwards I reheated a portion of last weekend's curry for dinner (it tasted even better after being frozen) and I had a couple of glasses or red wine with it, which went down very nicely. And then I lay in the bath reading for an hour before retiring to bed.

That seems to have done the trick. I had a very good night's sleep (at 94, it was the best score I've had since the 8th of February) and this morning I woke up actually feeling refreshed. I might still have an awful lot of things to figure out about who I am these days, but I'm going to count that as a step forward.

Thank you to everyone who bought some of my music for Bandcamp Friday yesterday; it is very much appreciated. It was particularly gratifying to see people buying some of my older albums, not just the most recent one which I released this week.

It's nice when people get where I'm coming from with my songs, too. One message I received just read "I totally guffawed at 'Why'd they have to be snakes'. Well done. "

Today I'll be tidying up project directories on the studio PC that I no longer need to store on a super-fast SSD, and then I'll return to the album which I'd been working on for the three months prior to FAWM kicking off. I've already got a few ideas for how to finish it off. I will also do a little more listening and commenting on the FAWM website before it goes back into hibernation (the current plan is for this to happen next weekend, as the number of people still leaving comments or posting in the forums has dropped off even more precipitously than it did last year). I was very chuffed to see that as of right now, all of the songs I posted this year have got at least ten comments and the odd-time-signature prog instrumental that I pinned at the top of my profile page has hit fifty comments!

It's been nearly a month since I last posted any photos of the construction of the new station, and things have moved on quite a bit since then. The new car park is a hive of activity and a lot of work is going on around the old Brunel coal chutes (although the access road is still flooded). But the thing that has changed the most is the structure of the station itself...

The lift shaft towers are now in place, overlooking Little Bristol Lane

I was surprised by how close the West tower is to the road, although after looking at the second architect's rendering here I can see how it's going to fit. There's still a massive amount of work to be done before the station opens next year, but seeing the towers in place like this is a big sign that it's all going ahead as planned and hopefully the work is proceeding without too many issues.

On Friday March 6th, Bandcamp will once again waive their transaction fees for artists, which means that we get a little bit more money from selling our music tomorrow than we normally would. And for the first time in quite a while, I have an album of new music for your consideration:

That's What They Said collects together a dozen of the songs I wrote during FAWM this year. I have given them a bit of a polish (which in some cases led to me completely rerecording the verse vocals) and remixed and remastered them all, because that's the sort of producer I am now, apparently.

I hope you'll give it a listen.

I think the pulled muscle that I've been suffering from for the past week is beginning to heal, because I've stopped yelping in pain every time I turned over in bed. As you can imagine, that's been making sleep even more difficult than usual, and I feel completely exhausted.

I'm hoping that now that the FAWM madness has died down, my mind will stop obsessing about songs and commenting and I can get some rest.

If you've been trying to contact me on my landline recently, you will have been getting a busy signal. That's because I've switched service providers and the "seamless transition" with no interruption to my service that I was promised didn't happen.

The new connection was supposed to go live today, but I've now been told that it's not going to happen for another week. While I've been happy with IDNet's performance as an ISP, their performance in this case has been rather less than stellar and I'm not happy about it.

If you need to contact me, you'll have to ring me on my mobile instead.

I think I managed to pull some muscles in my side lugging a PA cabinet into the pub for Friday night's gig. Moving about hurts. Since Saturday afternoon I have been taking things very easy, because I didn't really have any choice in the matter. So apart from catching up with my listening and commenting I've been mostly sitting on the sofa watching shows that I needed to catch up on, from season three of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (the 4K box set arrived yesterday) to season two of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (the first episode arrived on Apple TV on Friday and Kurt and Wyatt Russell were on the BBC's The One Show plugging it yesterday evening).

But I managed to cook a rather epic pork curry on Sunday. I felt a lot better after pigging out on that (I'd used an entire bulb of garlic in the recipe as well as one and a half packets of assorted chillies and a tube of ginger puree, so it was spicy, to say the least). And I had enough left over to put ten decent-sized servings in the freezer (which is now full).

I've not got anything planned at all for the rest of the week. And quite honestly, that suits me fine.

Every year after I finish taking part in February Album Writing Month, I sit down and have a proper think about what I've learned as a songwriter, composer, musician, recording engineer, and producer from taking part in the challenge of writing fourteen songs in four weeks (and this year I managed to do rather better than that, ending up with a grand total of twenty-four).

As I mentioned in my last blog entry, the stuff I've been making this year sounds different, somehow. I've been trying to figure out why that is. My initial reaction was that my mixes sound more like they were put together professionally than they've ever done before. There's more separation between instruments, more clarity in the sound, and fewer distractions from the track's intent. In my opinion, anyway.

But as ever, here are the top five things which really stood out for me as a result of working on music intensively for an entire month:

5. DON'T BE AFRAID TO ABANDON METHODS THAT WORK FOR YOU, NOT JUST THE ONES THAT DON'T

Just because you're happy with something that works for you right now, it doesn't mean you should stop looking for alternatives. One of the most obvious changes I made to my work this year was to stop using the "Transient Shaping Enhance" preset ot Ableton's stock Drum Buss plugin on my drum submix. I'd been using it since it was first introduced in Live 10. In fact I've stopped using the Drum Buss plugin altogether in favour of Sonnox's Oxford Inflator (which I picked up in a sale last summer for twenty quid) and the SSL Native Drum Strip. It wasn't that Drum Buss was inherently bad; when I started using it, I liked what it did to my drum sound, as it made it boomy and crunchy. But my ability to hear mix details has changed (more on that in a minute) and after sitting in on a couple of mix sessions at Real World Studios last year and hearing what a proper drum mix could sound like, I realised just how far off the mark my own mixes were and resolved to do something about it. Drum Buss was adding too much distortion and it didn't let the drums breathe. And it was doing that even when I kept its wet mix well under 50%.

I've also changed the default drum kit I use in Superior Drummer to one of the kits from the Hugh Padgham Hitmaker SDX that I picked up in Toontrack's Christmas sale because I love the airy spaciousness of the recording. It lets me get far closer to the ideal drum sound that I have in my head. Again, there was nothing wrong with the previous default kit I'd put in my template, but the Hitmaker SDX just works better for me. I might have reasons for being a bit biased about that, though.

4. WORKING WITH OTHERS IMPROVES YOUR OWN WORK FASTER

Six of the twenty-four songs I worked on last month were collaborations with other FAWMers. That's right: fully a quarter of the music I made in February involved working with other people, and as far as I know that's the largest proportion of non-solo work I've ever been involved with since I first signed up for FAWM way back in 2009. I was actually shocked to realise this just now, even though I've been working with other people a lot over the past year on projects which have nothing to do with FAWM at all. In the last twelve months, collaboration has just become part of my day-to-day music making, and it's been a lot of fun.

But working with others is a completely different ball game compared to writing and recording on your own. Aside from the technical aspects, there are multiple extra levels of context and nuance to negotiate. You have to explain what you're going for, and find out, react to, and then support whatever it is that your collaborators hope to achieve, and work together to make it happen in a way that you're all happy with. That involves learning to see your own work from someone else's perspective; it might not always be what you're expecting, but in my experience that is when you make the biggest advances as an artist. Those leaps will happen more often when you make sure that whenever you can, you're not the most experienced person in the room. Find yourself some teachers!

3. I WAS STILL TENDING TO MIX TOO HOT

I mentioned this as one of my five learning points seven years ago but it still applies: I get better mix results when I turn down the levels on component tracks. This particularly applies to tracks where there's a lot of high frequency information, which is why I found that this year I've been turning down live recordings of things like shakers and tambourines by as much as 25 dB.

It's still possible to record things too quietly, of course. I have a nice selection of recording equipment these days, but all electronic gear has a noise floor, which is the random sound generated by the circuits of the device itself, and if your input signal isn't significantly higher than that, you're not going to get good results.

My mastered tracks don't sound quiet, though; the final item in my mastering chain is the maximizer in iZotope's Ozone plug-in. I have that set at -14 LUFS (Loudness Units Full Scale) so that each track is rendered out at a more or less consistent volume. I think it's the maximiser that performs better when the sound I'm feeding into it is quieter, but I could be wrong...

2. PEOPLE ARE PUSHING BACK AGAINST AI. LIKE, A LOT

This year on my FAWM profile, I added the following text:

"I don't use any AI tools in my work. Even if you ignore the the fact that they only function because their programmers ripped off the work of thousands upon thousands of creative people without their consent, quite honestly, I just don't see the point of them. If I hand over any aspect of my creative process to what amounts to a glorified plagiarism machine, how is that going to improve my skillset? The answer is brutally simple: it can't. For me, AI is an artistic dead end that must be avoided at all costs. I don't even use iZotope's machine learning mastering wizards when I'm mixing or mastering something; I prefer to rely on my ears."

I was surprised by how many people messaged me in order to thank me for posting that. Apart from one or two users who really like poking the bear in order to get a reaction (see below), the attitude towards relying on AI amongst FAWMers is predominantly one of disinterest, with quite a few (like me) who are openly negative about its validity as part of the creative process. When the bear does wake up, and it has done several times in the forums over the past month, it tends to get very unhappy about the suggestion that using Suno or Udio or tools of that sort is okay. AI's advocates refer to those of us who oppose its use as "skeptics" or even "Luddites" but quite honestly I think we're closer to an angry mob brandishing torches and pitchforks, because the pro-AI folks really don't like it when we start discussing its wider implications, such as the energy costs involved, the environmental impacts, and increasingly contentious issues like water bankruptcy which result from all of the data centers now being built in order to support AI's use. Perhaps it makes them feel uncomfortable about picking the wrong side of the argument, because it damn well should do. You don't hear people who think deforestation is bad for the environment being described as "logging skeptics", do you? There's a reason for that...

I found it particularly telling that FAWM's strongest advocate of using AI music generation tools like Suno is also the most-blocked user on the site; several other users in the top ten muted/blocked list have uploaded work that is almost certainly AI-generated, even though they have not acknowledged that this is the case. It looks like I'm not the only one who just isn't interested in listening to work like that, either, because a lot of the several hundred songs which have yet to receive any comments (and the fact that three days in to March there are still any "zongs" left at all is unusual, all by itself) are big, bland productions which sound to me like they've been made with AI.

1. LISTEN MORE. EXPLORE MORE. LEARN MORE.

If I had to sum up how my approach has changed since last year, those six words are what I'd say to people. Since I upgraded my living room setup to a full Dolby Atmos 7.1.4 system, I've been listening to a lot of things which were mixed for immersive audio. As the name suggests, these mixes place the listener in the middle of the sound, rather than out in front of it. That spreads out the sound and radically affects your ability to make out the individual components of a mix and focus on what's happening, and for me at least, I found that a lot of the methods which were being used to keep the mix balanced and coherent translated well even when you folded them down into just two channels of stereo. As a result, I've become much more fussy about panning, and I've noticed that I now spend much more time moving things around in the stereo field until I find that spot where they pop out strongly. I've become much more adept at automating panning and volume, too; I used to be a keen proponent of "set and forget" for a song, but not any more. It wasn't doing my work any favours.

Maybe it's because I've finally accepted that I have sensory processing issues as a result of discovering that I'm Autistic, but in the past year I've become much more aware of hearing things and of my cognitive and physical reactions to the sounds I experience. That has taken me on a journey of personal exploration which I wasn't expecting. I have ended up thinking deeply about how I navigate the world of sound I'm subjected to, and how it affects me; how I become consciously aware of things I hear and the possible reasons why I might previously have ignored certain sounds; what sorts of noises do I focus in on, and which ones make me recoil? Why does one sound feel warm or comforting when another feels harsh, or even painful? I've also started to pay much more attention when I realise that I'm having difficulty making things out or when I'm becoming overwhelmed so that I can do something about it. The result of all this has been that my recordings sound markedly clearer. I'm not just imagining that, either; I've mentioned before how close my mixes get to the desired eq curve displayed in Tonal Balance Control 2 these days and since I last blogged about it, I've recorded more than a hundred more tracks and remained consistent in being able to dial in a balanced mix just using my ears. Who knew that just listening properly could pay off so much, eh?

I've also been much more active in seeking out information and advice from other people who work with sound. Whenever I visit Real World it doesn't matter who I find myself talking to; if they don't run away fast enough, they are going to find themselves being deluged with questions: "Why did you choose that particular model of microphone to record that?" "What is it that are you listening for when you apply that plugin?" "What did you do to get that vocal to sound like that?" I've been profoundly humbled by everyone's willingness to take the time to explain to a duffer like me what their internal process was, and I'm extremely grateful to everyone who did. But even when I'm back home and alone in my studio, there is a vast repository of useful advice from top-flight artists around the world that's available on YouTube and I've been watching an awful lot of instructional videos and paying very close attention to what's being shown. It all goes in my notebooks.

Finally, I've realised that even the professionals at the top of their game never stop learning. They never stop experimenting with new ideas and tools. Not a single one of the experts I've met (and I've met quite a few now) has ever said, "I already know everything I need to know in order to get the job done." There's always some new technique or device which can radically change your ability to craft the ideal mix which is lurking at the back of your mind. You have to remain open to the fact that no matter how good you are, there's always more to learn.

The FAWM website stopped allowing us to add new songs at noon, and the "Add new song" button has switched over to a "Challenge Over" graphic so that's it for another year. With one placeholder that my buddy Craig is still working on, my final tally for February 2026 stands at twenty-four songs. That's a pretty decent showing for me. Yesterday I toyed with the crazy idea of pushing myself to get to twenty-eight songs (referred to as a "double FAWM") but I just didn't have the spoons left for it. I woke up this morning at 04:30 and had the same idea again, but that was quite obviously insane, so instead I turned over in bed and went back to sleep.

According to Burr, the official final tally is 13,731 songs, which makes it the 3rd most prolific FAWM ever (after 2024 and 2021).

I'm sad it's over; I always am. It's a rush getting so much positive feedback on my work (I got hundreds of comments this year) and I love the immense outpouring of creative energy that lifts everyone up and carries them along in a wave of music making mania. It's always hard coming down from something like that. I'll mull over my experiences of last month for a few days and then post my traditional "What I've learned from taking part"post here on the blog. Listening to the work I did, something sounds different this year and I want to figure out what it is and why it happened.

And the site's still open for listening, of course. I'll fire the studio up later and get some more listening and commenting done, but the most important project I have scheduled for this afternoon is to make a nice big batch of pork curry.

Today marks the beginning of meteorological spring. The weather so far today has followed the traditional pattern for March: one minute it's sunny, the next it's raining. I'm not cold here in the living room right now, but I think I'll be keeping the central heating on its timer for a few weeks yet.

The temperature outside is in double figures, and the local wildlife has noticed. The hedgehogs have been out and about over the last few nights, the blue tits have been raiding the feeder full of suet pellets by the kitchen window, and the local jackdaws have been busy over the last few days adding to their nest in the chimney of the flats at the back of my house with some ludicrously oversized sticks.