These days most new artists apparently focus on finding a single song that will impact big on Spotify and YouTube, to the point that an album is often an afterthought or simply not released at all. And maybe these artists have the right idea - in this world ruled by the internet and social media, most people don't have the time or inclination to engage with a whole album, and playlist culture renders the flow of an album redundant anyway. But even if it's stylistically something different, as usual my new record is most definitely an album intended to be listened to as a sequence of songs, and I feel confident most of you are going to like it a lot.

One of the wonderful things about music and listening tastes is that they continue to evolve. A lot of rock fans claim music isn't as good or innovative as it used to be, and while I have to concede they're probably right, I think that's because the golden era for rock has passed and the real innovation is now happening in genres that don't focus on guitars, bass and drums (and I myself wonder what more there is left to say with these things, but I'm always happy to be proved wrong). This year one of the commercially successful songs I really liked was Bury a Friend by Billie Eilish - because it's brilliant, but also because the production was so sonically fresh. Maybe not surprising that it was recorded by someone not out of her teens to whom the era of classic rock music probably doesn't mean a lot.