I am in album making mode. Actually to be more accurate  I am in album recording mode because my approach to recording this new record is totally different from how I have recorded before.

Since 2012 I have been creating beats, in fact my homie Breis jokingly called me "kanye west in reverse" because it seems I have been more into making beats than writing but that is not true haha! I've just kept making loads of beats and every now and again a gem shows up and I keep it to one side. Sometimes a whole song will emerge, hook, verses and arrangement.

I've noticed a theme that's been developing. I have been writing a lot about being invisible, anonymous, unknown even though it might appear that you are "known" by a few. In this online social media internet era people can start thinking that your tweets, blogs, Facebook posts, YouTube uploads etc represent the totality of who you are. People think they "know" you fully but that isn't true at all. We are not our avatars. We are not our tweets. We are much more than that.

Who we are can never be fully known by our expressions online. I mean you could even live with a person for years and only begin to know the depths and complexity of that person talk less of through our expressions online which could be totally false to begin with. We can edit, filter, enhance, appear bolder and whatever we choose online. We can Photoshop our online "image" all we want but if we begin to believe that all these projections represent the totality of our being we definitely would be deluded.

This is why certain genre labeling for example doesn't work for me. I have stopped fighting what people label me as an artist. I now realise all I have to do is remind myself that I don't have to live up to the expectations of other people. I don't have to be held to unrealistic ideals anymore and that is liberating. Some people think what they believe or "know" about another person is all there is to that person, how dumb is that? Especially if you have never met the person and only know anything about them from online interaction.

Not everyone knows how to deal with complexity and depth but that is life for you. It is not all black and white and simple like we want it to be. There are lots of shades of gray whether we like it not. Sometimes we use things like music to try to escape to a place that is far away from the complexity of life for a few minutes (or hours, or days maybe?!) and there ARE parts of life that are blissfully simple we must not forget that, but life isn't always simple and the sooner we accept that and deal with it, the better. Yeah I know it is hard, trust me I do. It's all part of growing up.

So these are the things on my mind as I record this new project and it is why I am naming it "Familiar Stranger" I will elaborate more on all this in due time.