My daughter Mika was born in 2015, and before she even learned to speak she would sing. I remember walking the streets of Budapest with her, where we lived briefly when she was a baby, and she would start up a long, loud, endless note, and the only way to not go insane was to harmonise with her… She quickly progressed to coming up with little tunes, which soon acquired words, and by the time she was about three years old she was a fountain of hums and rhymes as well as stories about characters she made up…

When she was five I started to teach her piano, motivated by her frustration with not being able to record or remember her musical ideas (and mine and her mother’s with forever being called to write them down for her or record them on our phones). She progressed quickly, and was soon incorporating the piano into her creativity quite naturally…

To begin with the two of us would often write songs together, bouncing ideas back and forth, and one of the first fruits of that was ‘Wild Flowers’, which I thought was so good we ought to record it properly, so we put it down with Mika playing Rhodes piano and me filling out the arrangment, and her mum, Maree Choie helping out with a harmony vocal, and that became Mika’s first single…

She was still only 5 when we wrote that one, and 6 when we recorded it. As I’m writing this in summer 2024 she has reached the grand old age of 8, she’ll be 9 in October, and she’s been at the stage for a while now where she can write a song by herself from start to finish, and some of the things she writes are astonishing (and not just ‘for her age’, they’re just great songs by any measure)….

We’ve been recording them as we go, not in any particular hurry, and eventually she’ll have an album to share… Stay tuned…