The difference in quality between Open the Door and the previous number, of which no more will be spoken, is so pronounced that I assume either some attempts have gone missing, or the dating has gone wrong here. However, this song does have three telltale signs of my early music: lyrics that don’t make sense, a huge mistake in the playing towards the end, and that genuine mark of early Trying Artist authenticity – the computer mouse scrape-and-click.

What is clear is that at around this time I started improving. The general sound of the production sounds instantly crisper, the instruments are played a bit less badly, there are harmonies(!!!), there are fewer mistakes.

Musically, the song is significant in two key ways. The first is that the bass playing is quite good. The chorus features perhaps my most complex bass line, recorded inconveniently quietly so that it’s extremely difficult to hear unless you remember how it goes. Do you? This may mark the highpoint of my relationship to bass, when I considered it to be as integral as the drums, and had weekly lessons with a certain Mike who would make me play the same groove for 15 minutes straight while he went off into a jazz solo dreamland, which could be inspiring, intimidating, and quite long. Maybe a year after this song was made he went off to be (apparently) a successful double bass player, and I gradually began to only play the bass when recording.

The second is the use of the E major open chord shape, moved up and down the neck of the guitar. This was a very easy way of playing chords with complex names that I didn’t understand, except that they sounded good, and I may have used it to write five or six songs over the years. In fact, it’s still usually the first thing I play when I pick up a guitar. It’s built into my muscle memory.

Ultimately though, I feel nothing for Open The Door. It’s a bit insipid, don’t you think? I remember being proud of it, especially the chord sequence, which is longer than any I had written previously, and the drums, which certainly sound planned in the sense that there’s a different groove for each section of the song and I don’t just start solo-masturbating at the end. But the lyrics annoy me – as in a few other songs, I seem to have had an idea (something about opening up, speaking your mind, not being preoccupied with your own thoughts) and mixed it with other things (a breakup song, and, paradoxically, the sort of love-affirming lyrics you find in shit dance music: ‘Now we’re here and it’s my life. It’s what I want and I’ll show you now. Can you feel it, it’s coming near. Will you stay don’t try and disappear.’) It’s insipid.

Anyway, we’re placed somewhere in 2007, and we’re moving onwards and upwards.