John Monroe

On the 23rd June, Daylight Saving Records will release "Songs from the Shelf", the debut EP by John Monroe aka Andrew Moore, founding member of Field Music.

After the release of Field Music's second album Tones of Town in 2007 the trio of Peter Brewis, David Brewis and Andrew Moore, physically and financially wrung out by the indie circuit slog, called it quits. Peter and David both busied themselves with solo projects, eventually buying enough time and creating enough context to return as Field Music in 2010. While it may have seemed that Andrew had quietly stepped back to real life, that's not quite the whole story.

Andrew's presence on Field Music records continued, from sprinkling Hammond fairy dust on 2016's The Noisy Days Are Over to his central role as a composer and performer on the Music for Drifters soundtrack. But also, and less visibly, Andrew started his own pseudonymous solo project. Backed by Peter and David, recording sessions for a dozen songs took place in 2007 and 2008, mostly piano-led, with echoes of Billy Joel's new wave hustly, Randy Newman's wry Americana and Todd Rundgren's playful experimentalism. They were referred to as the "John Monroe" songs, after an old mishearing of Andrew's name as spoken in his soft North East baritone.

Of course, real life has a habit of getting in the way. Time gets tight and despite sporadic attempts to finish the recordings in the intervening years, they remained on the shelf. Until now. With the Field Music schedule uncharacteristically clean and the idea for Daylight Saving Records providing new impetus, Andrew set about revamping and finalising the songs, or at least enough of the songs for an EP: an attempt to draw a line under this project which we've now lived with and loved for 16 years.