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selling your CDs, so I’ve managed to carry on with some lessons. My wife’s in a similar situation
because she’s a full-time artist and so all the galleries have shut. All of her work, the tap has been

turned off just as quick as mine was, so what we’ve done, we’re lucky enough to have quite a big
garden and we’ve built a gazebo in the garden and we’re looking to start doing open-air workshops.
Workshops in our gazebo, so with the rules, it looks like we can do up to ten people. We’re going to
start doing that from August because both of us can’t rely on what’s happening outside. Yeah, so it’s
a bit of a shock.

BiTS: Let’s move on to something slightly more upbeat. We’ll talk about the new album. First of all,
tell me why is it called “The Birdcage Sessions”? It makes it sound like a lockdown title. Is it a
lockdown title?

EM: The idea was when I first started in the lockdown and I was thinking, what am I going to do? I
thought I can write songs and so I carried on writing and writing and writing, and the idea initially
was to write a song a week and then to do streaming concerts and play the songs and work towards

an album. A song is like a little bird being set free out of a cage of lockdown, so it’s embodying the
idea of freedom that we’re clinging to for the future. That was the idea, really, “The Birdcage
Sessions”.

BiTS: I take it, Eddie, that all the music is yours,
with the exception of ‘Amazing Grace’, of course,
which is incidentally a wonderful cover. I love it
very much indeed. Are all the rest of the songs
yours?

EM: Yeah, that’s right. They’re all original songs.
The new thing about the album, apart from the
fact it’s all new songs, is that I did it in lockdown,
so I did everything myself. [Chuckling] I’m a
multi-instrumentalist anyway, being a one-man

band, but I’ve learnt a few more instruments, so
I’ve got lap steel guitar on there, mandolin, banjo.
I even borrowed my son’s cello and did a couple
of sounds on the cello for some of the
arrangements. It’s the first album that I’ve
recorded in my newly built home studio. It’s a
really good studio. I’ve got really good equipment
because over the years, I’ve been building it up with the intention of doing recordings at home, but
never learnt how to be a sound engineer, which is a whole skill-set on its own, so with all the time
in lockdown that’s what I’ve been doing and this is the first album I’ve written and recorded and
played everything myself, with the exception of getting my son in on cello. He was my bubble

companion on lockdown at home. He was doing his GCSEs which was a nightmare.
BiTS: Before we move on to any other songs, tell me about ‘Amazing Grace’ because it’s obviously a

resonator that you’re playing, but it sounds as though there’s some sort of amplified reverb or
something on it. What is the technicality of that?

EM: It’s funny you should say that because it’s actually just a resonator guitar, but as I say, I
engineered it myself and what I did is I put microphones around the room. I’ve got an attic studio in
my house. It’s quite a big room. It’s got a very high ceiling which is fantastic for recording studios,
it means you get a really nice ambient sound, and the resonator guitar is loud, and it’s got a lot of