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were teenagers, when I was 16, he had a stroke, a severe stroke that left him in a
wheelchair, and he had to try to learn to walk again and talk again and move the
right side of his body again because it was paralysed. During that, time The Stroke
Association, a charity that helps over 1.3 million strokes survivors across the UK,
were really good to him. They did local meet-ups and he got to socialise, and they
also gave a lot of advice and information to us through a really difficult time. My dad
actually died four years later, whilst I was at university, so that's 2009. It will be 15
years in January since he died. Soon after he died, I started writing some words
down because there were lots of questions I never got to ask him, and I had a lot of
guilt around that. I started writing down some of the things I didn't get to ask him,
and then I started writing some sort of imagined answers of what he might have
thought about his life. Things that he never got to tell me, and in the end, those lyrics
became the title track to this new album, “Shine”. The rest of the tracks are loosely
based around his personality and his approach to life. I've tried to make them fun
and upbeat as well as some sad bits on there. But as you say, the album is a charity
album, so I've funded the album myself. I've spent quite a lot of money making it
happen, paying the musicians and the studio and all that, but I've decided that every
single penny from every sale is going to go to The Stroke Association. So not just the
profits. There won't be profits. I'm making a loss on it. It's just every single penny
I've earned so far from sales and every penny to come will go to The Stroke
Association because I wanted to do something that gives something back to them
and kind of honours the memory of my dad. So that's the basic idea.
BiTS: That’s absolutely wonderful. Like I said, I'm going to be playing tracks on my
radio show very shortly. Tell me how and tell other people who are going to be
reading this interview, how they can get hold of the album.
LW: Yes. The easiest way is to get over to greenbulletrecords.com. That's my record
label, and at greenbulletrecords.com there’s a store and you can buy the CD or the
digital download. It is available for digital download from other sources, from
Amazon and from Apple Music and all of that, and it is available to stream. I wanted
it to be as widely available as possible. The only thing with things like streaming, as
you know, is you just earn nothing on them. It's sort of 0.00 pence for 100 plays.
You know, it's nothing. So all I would say is if people are streamers rather than, you
know, they don't want downloads, they don't want CDs, I would please urge you and
ask that you consider making a donation direct to The Stroke Association if you're
listening to the album on Spotify or anything like that. You don't need to come to