Ian has been writing songs for a number of years and has finally completed recording a number of them. Primarily a songwriter, multi instrumentalist and lastly a singer, it has taken time and patience to realise the culmination of the ideas, words and melodies into finished and polished songs.

Influenced by rock and pop music across four decades, he has crafted songs from his personal experiences, life and love’s successes and failures, with melodies that can be memorised and sang along to. From Ian’s perspective, the listener needs to be engaged with the song, needs to identify with the words and believe them, but still be able to hum a good tune.

Ian believes that writing is about each individual song. Each song starts with an idea, and then decides where it’s going to go, what it’s going to say, and then evokes a mood or feeling. It’s the writer’s job to fuse all that together into a coherent musical rendition.

The songs that have been recorded on the first album “Sweet Tasting Poison” range from being 3 to 30 years old, and were chosen as examples of the art of song writing, rather than being personal favourites. Hopefully they entertain, they may even inspire, but they will demonstrate that Ian is a premier songwriter.

A friend’s teenage daughter was what he considered as “going off the rails”. Until it was pointed out that he was basically the same when he was a teenager, and it all turned out right in the end, so let her blow of some steam.

Everybody has these moments I’m sure. You think you are over a failed relationship because it’s been months and then you bump into them in the street. The awkwardness brings it all back and you realise that you’re not over it yet.

I was hurting badly over a break up and my father told me that men don’t cry and to be a man. I disagree. Men cry. There’s no shame in it. I can cry over a sad movie.

My very first love song. I had not been able to write a convincing song about love because it was embarrassing. All that sentimentality. Until it happened for real and the words just poured out. Once the first was done, the rest were easy.

A lady friend of mine thought that I was going to be her saviour. She poured out her heart to me and then I realised that I couldn’t be what she wanted. A sad way to end.

A lady friend of mine was going internet dating and meeting somebody she had not physically met. When I asked her the next day how she had got on, she simply said “well there was no now, so there’s no way”.

Overlooking the Waitemata Harbour from Mount Victoria in Devonport to Auckland City at twilight. As the lights in the city come on, the harbour water is so clear it looks like they come on under water. Auckland is one of the world’s prettiest cities.

A simple observation on how a relationship develops. People grow at different speeds and change over a period of time. The speed of those changes decides whether people grow apart or closer together.

I was feeling particularly sorry for myself. Another failed relationship that cut deep and I found that I couldn’t even motivate myself to be on the “rebound”.

A straight forward interpretation of a relationship I had that seemed to poison everything. One of life’s mysteries, why in a relationship people try to change the other person into something they are not.

An observation on a friends failed marriage because of his infidelity. After him explaining his mistakes to me, I had to put myself in his shoes and write the words.

I’d never been taught how to write songs, they just happened and when I looked at it, I had always taken every effort to make things rhyme and I asked myself “Should I”. Well of course I should. Everybody expects there to be rhyming.

If preferred, it is possible to buy a physical CD, but this will require postage.

Please send an email by using the Contact page with details, and I will reply with costs.