What comes next

The summer record is out and finished, and the honest answer to "what now" is that I've already started the next one.

I'm not going to pretend I know exactly what it is yet. That would be a lie and you'd be able to tell. What I know is the direction, and the direction came out of paying attention to which songs people actually stayed with.

The thing I learned this summer is that reach and repeat are different animals. A song can get in front of a lot of people and mean nothing to any of them. Another can get in front of very few and become somebody's whole August. I'd rather write the second kind, and that's a decision that changes what goes on a record.

So the next one is less about covering ground and more about staying somewhere. Fewer big swings, more of the ordinary hours — the parts of "Ticket Stand" and "Out of Focus" that I nearly cut and then couldn't. Those turned out to be the ones that hold up on the tenth listen.

I'm also writing more for the band than I used to. Knowing a song will have a room in it changes how you build it. You leave gaps. You write a line people can shout back. That's a different craft to writing something for headphones at midnight and I'm enjoying learning it.

Timeline: next year. I'm not going to be more precise than that, because every time I've named a date I've either rushed to hit it or quietly missed it, and neither made the songs better.

In the meantime the whole catalogue is up in the new video format, the live side is filling in, and I'm writing most days.

If there's a song of mine you keep coming back to, tell me which one. I mean it — it's the most useful thing anybody sends me, and it genuinely affects what I write next.