You Know Who You Are Joel Dobbins

Starting out as a simple acoustic guitar album, Joel originally laid out almost an album's worth of new material but wasn't happy with the sound. Inspired by classical music's orchestral movements and rock opera, he scrapped the project and started again after a 20 month recording hiatus creating a continuous medley morphing from one song to another. While mapping out the album bar by bar, the song choice and tempo was adjusted. He picked only the very best of the new songs from the abandoned acoustic album project and finished off some songs left over from previous projects which were already very nearly completed. As Joel had a very specific and experimental vision in mind, he chose to mix the album himself like earlier albums such as "Freedom", "Yes" and Gravier's "I Decided To Tell You".

The iMac experienced no latency in drum recording compared to while using the Macbook Pro, so the drums were much easier and enjoyable during recording as he could listen to the high quality Logic Pro drum sound direct rather than having to listen to what was coming directly from the drum kit itself, which being a cheap electric drum kit isn't as good as the quality Logic Pro offers. It was much faster to switch between the MIDI interface and the audio interface for this reason too. The drums are recorded in MIDI whilst everything else is recorded directly either via microphone or direct input. Recording the drums actually became the least time consuming instrument to record, which otherwise was a lot more of a bother, so I have actually never had as much fun recording drums for this project compared to any other. Another reason why it was so enjoyable was that my timing had greatly improved, so I could play more intuitively and really feel the groove as opposed to having to consciously focus on keeping in time which I did on previous projects.

As for both the album title and cover, much metaphor is used to describe people of narcissist tendencies we've all had experiences with in our lives, some close to home and others afar. The album title is a line taken directly out of the first song "(I Know) You Are Listening", since some of the narcissists Joel refers to may literally be listening as the rest of the lyrics describe. A gas light is featured to represent "gaslighting" on the cover, referring to a narcissistic technique of continually undermining and devaluing one's own opinion so the victim begins to start self-doubting their own opinions and instead lean on a manufactured perspective the narcissist wants them to believe. The shadows of "flying monkeys", a psychological term for those who cooperate with narcissists for their own gain, is also featured. The psychologist who first coined the phrase "flying monkeys" was actually inspired by The Wizard Of Oz movie, with the Wicked Witch of The West being the head narcissist of the "narcissistic cult". Most notably in the cover though, the musical notation is what is literally bringing light to the mask, which otherwise perhaps would have remained completely hidden in the darkness.

The album is due to be released on the 30th December 2023.