I’m so happy that my 2006 album Antidepressant is going to be back in print, available digitally, on CD and for the first time, as a vinyl LP (with bonus 45) on March 19th.

2006 was probably the low point of my career, in terms of numbers, that tour I played the smallest venues I can recall, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Antidepressant is my lowest selling album. These memories had probably tainted my feelings about the album, and as time passed I’d grown into a position which saw it as the rather tepid follow up to Music in a Foreign Language, maybe my favourite of all my albums. So I was very pleasantly surprised, when revisiting to supervise the mastering late last year, to find that I’m very pleased with it, and it sounds as I hoped it would, like a fleshed out expansion on its predecessor. With strings and drums and harmony vocals, even!

These recordings were almost entirely ‘in the box’. The strings come from sampled recordings, as do most of the drums and the entire thing was mostly programmed, rather than played. 75% of the sound is me in a room, for almost a year, with a computer and some microphones and a guitar. So there is no analogue master to work with for the LP. We had to work with my digital masters and process them to sound appropriate for vinyl. Thankfully we had the excellent mastering engineer Kai Blankenberg at Skyline Tonfabrik to work with.

There isn’t a single song on it I regret recording and ‘The Young Idealists’, ‘Woman In A Bar’ and ‘Rolodex Incident’ can stand shoulder to shoulder with my very best, I think. I never tire of singing the first two and I wish I could figure out a way to perform Rolodex…

Neil Clark, from the Commotions, plays guitar, various friends play bass, the Negatives sing back ups and Western Massachusetts local legend David Trenholm arranges the virtual string section. Mick Glossop mixed after Chris Hughes supervised final overdubs in the UK.

There was only one completed outtake from the recording sessions – ‘Coattails’. This track has aged well and I should probably have figured out a way to include it in the original running order but I didn’t. So we’ve included it as an extra track at the end of the CD and as a bonus 45RPM single with the album.

Thanks again to Los Angeles artist Susan Logoreci for allowing me to use her beautiful ‘Silverlake revisited’, and her handwriting for the sleeve, and once again last year in providing updated images so that we could work with the new formats.

Thanks to earMusic and Maine Road Management for making this happen. We start work on Music in a Foreign Language very soon.