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    This is my second album - another DIY home grown and home recorded suitcase of songs that I've been carrying around festivals over this past year.

    Some songs you'll have heard me playing live a lot in fields and around campfires and some songs are ones that I've sat on for a year and let them grow into new versions of themselves.

    Either way, I hope you like what you hear and that some of the songs can can give you the same comfort they did to me when I wanted to hide in my wardrobe when everything else felt too difficult.

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    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of #lovewins, conversations with a racist, The Half-Arsed Defeat, Festival Friends, Problems, Fiction, Drug Induced Dreams, State Of Unfair, and 8 more. , and , .

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lyrics

I really love dogs
but the black dog’s a cunt
and he always arrives when I really don’t want him around
I grin through a clenched jaw
the dog’s got it in for me
more so today than he has done before
but I’ve found

that his bark it’s got nothing on the bite that he bears
he’s looming consuming me making me scared
not of what he will do
but what I will when I no longer care.

And I haven’t showered for weeks
and I stink
of the ways that I cope with the dog and the drinks
that I swear I won’t have anymore they add fuel to his fire
And I used to think I'd fight him off
But today I'm too tired.

He’s grown up beside me
since I was fourteen
and back then they would call it a phase I would find my relief
In marks I would make and the tablets I’d take
by the handful to see if the black dog would stop chasing me

but his kind do not take well to threats or decisions
that don’t end in tears or another admission
to hospital wards or a waging of wars in
your head
and the black dog has funded the fight to invade me again.

I won’t fight out of bed or these jeans
I've been wearing too long and for too many weeks
I am weak in my bones from the sticks and the stones that he fires
And I used to think I'd fight him off
But today I'm too tired.

He got stuck in my teeth
Found him lodged in my throat
When I tried to scream that I can't take the black dog no more
He crept into my head
crawled inside of my bones
and I don’t know the cure for a dog that is sick in his soul

but you cannot kill what has slowly been killing you
honestly all of your life you’ve been feeding it too.

So I’ll stay in my bedroom and sleep
I won’t show up for work and my friends will eventually leave
me alone I should care but I don’t, I am fine
and I used to say I’d fight him off
and I used to think I’d show some guts
I used to think I was enough
but today I’m too tired

credits

from The Half​-​Arsed Defeat, released December 30, 2019

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Ren Stedman Southend On Sea, UK

Ren Stedman, he's the acoustic guy who looks metal, has a buzzing vocal, plays from the marrow of his bones and will rip your heart out with his honesty. A fierce, fable wielding force of acoustic punk poetry.

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