...Loves You by The Black Maria Memorial Fund

In the last days of last summer, Patrick, Windom and I recorded these songs in a little church, in the sleeping heart of rural Bedfordshire.

Overseeing proceedings from behind his large, mixing desk-shaped lectern was our friend and hero Johnny Parry.

In the short time we had together, Patrick got very excited about the church's bell*, Anne-Marie Kirby stopped by and shipwrecked our hearts with her violin, and Johnny taught us how to waltz around a darkened kitchen floor.

Most of the songs were recorded completely as live**, either in the little church or in the sprawlingly beautiful cottage we were calling home. While we sang and tripped over each other's feet, Claire Harrison was back in Falmouth, designing the album's foldingly beautiful sleeve.

The last song on the album is the last song we recorded. As we reached the final verse – and despite the unrepentant atheism of more than one the preceding tracks – the heavens opened. Turn the volume up at the end and you'll hear us sitting in the pews, trying to be quieter than the rain.

Love Kieran, 21.06.2011

*Witness the opening few seconds of Hotel Esmeralda.

**Recording ‘as live’ here means recording everybody playing at once, often with little or no room to correct mistakes later. If you plan to use this phrase in conversation, it’s important to remember that there is no direct opposite to describe the much more common approach of recording one instrument at a time. The sentence ‘Yeah, I heard they locked themselves away in the studio for months, recording the whole thing as dead’ is not correct. Well, maybe if you're referring to a goth band. ;)

thememorialfund.com