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I wrote the lyrics to Bruises a long time ago, and I wasn't sure that they were finished, but today I feel like sharing them anyway.

Sometimes it's better to half-say something that's on your mind than it is to remain silent.

• Bruises

It's been a while since I've put any new lyrics up here, but that doesn't mean I've stopped writing. I never stop writing.

Songs like My Tattoo.

• My Tattoo
  

Sometimes I write lyrics specifically for people who ask. In those cases, the music might already exist, or the singer might have an idea of what he or she wants the song to be about, and at the very least I have a particular style of music in mind. Emmylou is a good example of such a song - General Bye Bye's singer Philippe told me a story and together we turned it into a song.

Sometimes, however, I write simply because the lyrics need to be written. When that happens, it's up to me to find someone afterwards to sing the song. I think of them as songs in search of a singer, and I just put a whole bunch of new ones online, including An Open Relationship and Soles.

• Emmylou
• An Open Relationship
• Soles
  

Here's a video, featuring a heart-felt vocal performance by Philippe, of General Bye Bye performing the unreleased song Murder Of Crows during their Oliver Peel Session last weekend.

• Murder Of Crows

When General Bye Bye were collecting funds on KissKissBankBank to help finance their recent US tour, one of the prizes they offered to generous contributors was the chance to have the group write a song for you.

Gilles-Marie Zimmerman, a photographer from Paris, took them up on their offer - and yesterday he listened for the first time to the song they came up with based on my lyrics, Flirting With The Camera.

By all accounts, Gilles-Marie was very pleased with the result.

• Flirting With The Camera

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Last night I attended the launch party for Girouette, the eagerly-anticipated first album from General Bye Bye that was released this week on Greed Recordings.

The album was recorded before I started working with the band so doesn't feature any of my work. However, at yesterday's gig they did perform two new tracks for which I've written the lyrics, including Emmylou, which lead singer Philippe introduced as being "a story about a guinea pig I met in Texas, that Stuart Mudie turned into a song".

In fact, my lyrics were about a hamster, not a guinea pig, but it's still a great tune.

• Emmylou

• Honeycomb

Although songs like Cactus, Ashtray and Crayon are probably most representative of how I write, I do venture outside my rock and folk ghetto from time to time as well.

Lately I've been in the studio with a pair of electro producers from Versailles called Juan Carlos, working on a track that begins "Like a piece of chocolate, I'm slowly melting beneath your touch, babe"; I've launched a collaboration with a very funky young singer called Marlene Rodrigues; and I've written a song called Kiss By Kiss for Ashton Kennedy.

Sometimes it's good to broaden your horizons.

• Kiss By Kiss
  

I wrote the lyrics for several tracks on the album Candy Pop Folk, including The Whisper Of The Leaves and Rules Are Made To Be Broken.

Candy Pop Folk is the most recent release from Kosinus, a successful French music library that supplies instrumental music and songs for use in advertising, documentaries, films and other media.

They may have been created for expressly commercial purposes, but they're still nice little songs that I'm proud to have written.

• The Whisper Of The Leaves
• Rules Are Made To Be Broken