The sun has long set on the “Apparitions” album, and overall, I was very happy with the reaction it received. I got great coverage in magazines and blogs worldwide, and one of my singles, “Till The Last Breath”, was featured in the world’s premier guitar magazine, Guitar World.

The four years that have elapsed since then have been more than eventful. The death of my 98-and-a-half-year-old father in November 2021 saw the end of a generation of Hodgsons and led to a lot of self-reflection. This also came at a time when I was struggling to come up with material which I felt was good enough to form a worthy successor to “Apparitions”. In a determination not to repeat myself musically, I ended up scrapping an entire album’s worth of material that very year. However, better days were just around the corner.

Aside from the discarded songs, I had written a track called “You I Think Of”. Somehow, this was different, and I knew it was a keeper. Like most good songs, it came out of thin air, and it was almost like it wrote itself. It was based on the romantic notion of meeting a girl from Dublin City, something which can be witnessed in the song’s final refrain of the classic Molly Malone. Little did I know, I ended up prophesying my future, as that very same year, I did indeed meet a girl from Dublin and ended up marrying her the following year- 2022. (That fateful song did come to fruition. It was recorded along with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and ended up being one of the most memorable moments of the “Fields Of Redemption” sessions).

At last, I had a musical starting point, but the tracks still weren’t flowing as freely as I would have liked. Something was still lacking. So, I decided to head off on a trip through my beloved Ireland with my new wife and my trusty Fender Marauder in search of the inspiration I craved…