What it’s like to make an album with your heroes.
Sometimes creativity can be difficult to master. Marshall always knew he had artistic talents, but it took him a long time to find out exactly what it was. He played his first guitar in a band in high school; he then went to film school and came to London with cinematic plans. This didn’t work out, so he picked up a guitar again and weirdly met a young performer who turned out to be Ed Sheeran. He then directed TV commercials in Bollywood, studied interactive storytelling, lived in Beijing, and then started writing. He’s now written four novels and fifteen screenplays. A turning point came when he was involved in a near-fatal car accident, and it changed his perspective on life.
This is when music came back into his life properly, and with all this life experience, writing songs came to him easily. His debut album was Sand And Glue in 2024, which was favourably received. This led him to contemplate a follow-up, and in his youth, he’d been fanatically following Blind Melon, and through a weird coincidence, he found out that the band’s Christopher Thorn had recently opened Fireside Studio in Joshua Tree. With nothing to lose, Marshall reached out to Thorn, and eight months later, he’s working with his musical heroes on his own album. Thorn suggested fellow bandmate Roger Stevens join the album lineup, and this was extended with the inclusion of Foo Fighters keyboardist Rami Jaffee and Matthias Scheenberger of The Afghan Whigs, together with Jon Ossman on bass and Denny Weston Jr on drums. Marshall plays acoustic guitar throughout and supplies all the lead vocals.
It’s an eight-track selection of americana rockers with hints of folk rock and alternative music. It opens with the angry Run, a mid-tempo rocker that’s based on a true story of a murder that happened locally to Marshall’s home. He explains, “A guy visiting from England was confronted by a Bangladeshi restaurant owner after attempting to dine-and-dash in the town next to me. He punched the owner in the head, killing him. The entire community came together in anger around this.” As the song plays out, the chorus’s frustration and despair are there for all to hear.
Somebody New stars atmospherically with some cool keyboard playing and a solid drumbeat, before an electric guitar’s riffs interrupts. Marshall explains the background to the song. “I had just started going to open mics, and I didn’t really know anyone apart from the venue’s host. I was attracted to a woman I hadn’t seen before, and I asked the host about her. ‘She’s great, but I hate her boyfriend’ was the response I got. This inspired this bluesy, groove-laden song”.
Take Me Anywhere is a slightly more gentle, almost dreamlike song, and indeed, the story for the song came from a dream Marshall had that included Van Morrison’s highly potent presence. Wreck Your Life (For Rock’n’Roll) is the catchiest song on the album and is an ode to all those ’70s rockers that influenced Marshall’s musical life, referencing The Doobie Brothers and Van Morrison again.
On My Way is a slower song about unfinished love based on a true story from Marshall’s incident-filled life. Outta Here has some lovely guitar interplay and an infectious groove around that frustrating split second when staying becomes unbearable and leaving turns into an act of survival.
This is a really enjoyable album, with exemplary musicianship on show and confident, assured songwriting and singing from Marshall. Definitely worth checking out.
