Most of these songs fell out of the sky in the last year or so.
I've been making a living from playing the double bass for over twenty years, starting in jazz and abstract improvised music and slowly gravitating towards understated acoustic singer-songwriter territory. As a bassist this has invariably meant accompanying other people, so it's a surprise to have ended up with a collection of songs which seem to demand that I perform them on my own.
Arnie Cottrell plays guitar on Start Again and I Don't Want to Live Forever; otherwise, what you get is me, principally on double bass and voice with some additional cello (on Too Many Monkeys and When It Rains), guitar (on Monkeys and Sleep) and noise (throughout).
Rick Foot, spring 2016
Lyrics to the songs can be found here.
Dai Jeffries has reviewed the album for folking.com:
On Rain Machine Rick Foot emerges as a
singer-songwriter with a light but characterful voice and an original
turn of phrase. True, some of his songs are as dark as the CD cover – The
End Of The World Was Last Thursday is a twenty second
vignette that might give you a hint ... The best
line of all comes in the chorus of Everything Turns Beige
where he sings “we’re all of us in the gutter but we're looking at
Wetherspoons”, summing up the theme of the album as a catalogue of the
insanities of modern life ... You couldn’t
exactly call Rain Machine straightforward but it is as simple as it can
be given the ingredients and it’s damn good. It will be up there as one
of my albums of the year."