At its core, it was driven by a very personal ambition: to reconnect with the feeling of discovering music when I was young — really young. That moment in life when sounds felt larger than life, when records weren’t just something you listened to, but places you could disappear into. I wanted to recreate that sense of wonder, curiosity, and slightly naïve excitement that defined my earliest musical memories.
It’s impossible to talk about that feeling without acknowledging what was happening on the British music scene throughout the 1960s. It was an era of constant motion and creative risk-taking. Of course, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones tower over the decade like cultural monuments, but they were far from alone. Bands such as The Kinks, The Who, Cream, The Yardbirds, Small Faces, Traffic, Procol Harum, The Moody Blues, and the early Syd Barrett–led Pink Floyd all explored their own corners of this expanding musical universe. Each brought something distinct — sharper storytelling, raw power, bluesy experimentation, orchestral ambition, or outright psychedelia.
With Things I Do On Grass, I wasn’t interested in imitation. There are no direct copies, no intentional pastiches of any single band. Instead, the goal was to tap into the essence of that time: the warmth of analogue tones, the loose but confident performances, the sense that the rules were still being written. I wanted the album to feel familiar yet unplaceable, like a half-remembered radio broadcast from a sunnier, stranger decade.
As the album took shape, a few tracks naturally drifted into more psychedelic territory — slightly warped, occasionally odd, and sometimes unapologetically strange. But that, too, felt historically honest. By the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, music was stretching out in every direction. Songs became longer and less predictable. Structures loosened. The lyrics became surreal, abstract, and symbolic. Musicians reached for Mellotrons, flutes, strings, and odd time signatures, as well as layered arrangements that went far beyond the basic bass–guitar–drums framework.
That was the moment I felt the pull toward progressive rock.
Even though I’ve never considered myself a hardcore prog rock devotee, creatively, it felt like the next logical step. Prog offered space — room to breathe, to experiment, to let ideas unfold without rushing toward a chorus. So I leaned into it. Through many late-night sessions (and more than a few daylight hours), I worked obsessively on refining prompts and musical directions, searching for a sound that felt both exploratory and cohesive. There was plenty of back-and-forth in the process, and no shortage of ideas that ended up discarded along the way. But gradually, a clearer vision emerged.
The result is a complete album:
The Lush Fields of Riverdale
This time, I made a deliberate effort to maintain a strong progressive thread throughout the record — not just musically, but lyrically as well. I wanted the songs to feel connected, as if they belonged to the same landscape and emotional world. Much of that world is inspired by the English countryside: open fields, slow-moving rivers, quiet paths, and a sense of pastoral calm mixed with underlying mystery. The title track carries this influence most strongly, but you’ll hear it echoed across several other songs on the album — in both imagery and mood.
The Lush Fields of Riverdale isn’t about nostalgia alone. It’s about looking backward to move forward, borrowing the adventurous spirit of the past while shaping it into something personal and present. It’s an album meant to be listened to in full, preferably without interruption, letting the songs unfold and breathe at their own pace.
But enough words.
Press play.
Turn it up.
And let the fields open up around you.
🎧 Listen to The Lush Fields of Riverdale here:
https://suno.com/playlist/f31721b9-0d34-4f14-8c2b-a31f9aa2e080
