As someone’s recent rave Quick Take said: “Some Things Are Worth Remembering is The Bardic Depths’ best album, and a 2026 Favorite for sure.” It was only a matter of time before I zoomed in with our old friends Dave Bandanna, Gareth Cole and Peter Jones for an in-depth roundtable. The video of our conversation follows below, with a partial transcript before the jump and the completion afterwards. (By the way, not only does TBD’s Bandcamp page enable you to purchase a download of the new album, it has worldwide links for purchasing LPs, CDs and t-shirts as well!)

So, congratulations on the new album. Now, I’ve heard some mixed messages recently. Is Some Things Are Worth Remembering the final Bardic Depths album?

Dave Bandanna (Dave): I’m not the person to answer that.

Gareth Cole (Gareth): Straight in with the difficult questions. Well, it kind of is, but possibly isn’t the sure answer. Go on, Dave, you tell your bit.

Peter Jones (Pete): As far as we know now, it is, yes.

Dave: Halfway through recording this album, I decided that – I’d not had enough, I wasn’t at my wit’s end, but I realised that it actually takes two years to write, record, produce and then promote one of these things. And we’ve been doing this since the first album, back in 2019. And I’ve got other things I need to do in my life. I’m 67 years old now, so I’ve got to get things sorted out and everything.

And so I decided that that was going to be my last Bardic Depths album, because I didn’t want to say to the guys, well, look, it’s my last one for now and just leave it on tenterhooks and not know when the next one was going to be. So I just made a decision to say, right, it’s now. And Pete will tell you his side of the thing as well. But he sort of agreed with me. And so I said, right, that’s it. Let’s go out with a bang and make this the final one.

There’s been a little bit of sort of, you know, people on the side saying, “Is it really going to be? This is your best record. Why are you going out now?” So I’ve sort of rescinded a little bit. And I’ve now said that the door is shut at the moment. I’ve got no plans to open it, but I haven’t locked it.

Pete: You know, this is going to sound like the worst of first world problems, but it is sort of a struggle for a lot of musicians at the moment. And we’ve wondered at times whether we were getting any further up the ladder, if we were being noticed any more than we were on the last album, the one before.

And I must say, it’s very nice that quite a few people have said, “Oh, no, this can’t be the last one. You’ve got to be kidding.” That’s really nice to know that we have got those loyal fans out there, no matter how small that pool may be.

But for me I didn’t want to say it today when we started sort of making this the last one, but I was kind of thinking “There’s something I’ve got to separate from just because of how much I’ve gotten myself into”. And, you know, three or four years ago, I wasn’t even thinking about that kind of thing. I was doing everything that came up and I was collaborating and stuff. And more often than not involved in nine or ten projects at any one time.

And Will at White Knight, my record label, said, “You know, you’ve got to stop doing this. You’re gonna burn out.” I was like, “No, it’ll be fine.” Anyway, yeah, last year I kind of burned out. [Laughs]

And so when Dave said this was going to be the last one, I was kind of sad, but also, OK, this is one thing I can take off the agenda for now. But of course, now having done the album and listening back to it, yeah, this is really good. And I think people are going to enjoy this. And I’m thinking it’s a bit of a shame that this is the last one.

So, yeah, I’m like Dave: never say never. But I think we’ve all got various things happening, either in just life in general or with music and stuff that’s going on. We could all do with just stepping back for a bit. But I hope the good idea is to leave people wanting more. So hopefully this album will do that.

Anything to add to that, Gareth?

Gareth: Well, I understand Dave and Pete completely, although I come at it from a different point, because I’ve played with a bunch of bands and done various recordings. And the Bardic Depths is certainly by far my favorite band to be part of from a recording perspective.

I like how we work together, especially with Dave. It’s very creative and it’s very open and it’s a good cycle of sending ideas and getting them back. And Dave is incredibly good at arranging my half-baked ideas into something that sounds really good. And so I’m probably happiest with this new album of all the things I’ve ever been part of. So the idea that this was going to be the last one was never for me. And I’m available whenever selected for the next one. So, maybe!

OK. And of course, our mutual friend Brad Birzer wrote most of the lyrics for this album. And I don’t remember asking this before, because Brad really doesn’t write poetry. He writes this kind of poetic prose, his meditations on culture. So how do you go about finding the music for that kind of lyric? Do you have a set approach? Does it vary?

Dave: I’ll let you into a little secret. Brad knows how we’ve done this. This time around, we possibly wrote the music first because of the way that this album sort of came about writing wise, because I started writing differently on a keyboard using orchestral tools to do it. As you can hear from “Islands,” that was one of the first ones that I wrote. “October Sun” was another one. And Gareth also came in with some other ideas and solid set pieces as well. So musically we were writing differently.

So when it came to the lyrics, Brad hadn’t actually sent anything in by then. And on a couple of the songs on the previous album, I’ve gone through Brad’s Mythical Realms piece that he’d written. And I pulled out lyrics or I pulled out phrases from his prose, his writing, and turned them into lyrics. And that’s exactly what I did on this album as well.

So “October Sun” is actually Brad’s essay on Octobers in Michigan. But the way that he writes is so poetical in a way anyway, that you can pull out phrases and list them down, move them about, edit them around. And all of a sudden you’ve got poetry, you’ve got a song out there. And so I did that with “October Sun,” the “Islands” track.

Again, I went into Brad’s writing about Big Big Train’s “The Underfall Yard” and pulled lyrics from that. And that’s where the title came from. Just one line said “some things are worth remembering.” And as soon as I saw that, what a great title for an album! It was possibly going to be the title of the track “Islands” as well. But we left “Islands” as it was.

And again, “Arribabok” was Brad’s little essay on the evolution of language. And that’s where “Arribabok” came from. “Arribabok” originally didn’t even have any lyrics to it.It was going to be an instrumental until Gareth said, “Well, it’s a great little song. Why don’t we find some lyrics for it? So we turned that into a vocal song. “Arribabok” just being a made up name that the choir patch that I was using sounded like they were singing.

Pete: I didn’t know that. We live and learn.

Dave: The other contribution that Brad wrote was “A View,” which was a Birzer Bandanna song from 10 years ago. That I really liked and never thought that I developed it far enough.

Pete: I didn’t know that. We live and learn.

Gareth: I didn’t know it was a Birzer Bandanna song.

Dave: I’ve told you this before.

Gareth: You didn’t tell me it was a Birzer Bandana song you’d already done.

Pete: You haven’t told me nothing!

Gareth: Nothing, guv’nor!

Dave: It was a Birzer Bandanna that never got fully adapted. And so that was a complete lyric that Brad had already written. And the last two songs, “Rewind” and “Harder to See,” I wrote the lyrics for. So Brad’s contribution is immense for the album, because some of the songs, the lyrics are absolutely fabulous. But they all come from prose. They all come from written pieces, which is what Brad’s great at. That’s what he’s good at.

To be fair, Brad can’t rhyme a lyric to save his life. And I knew that and I knew he couldn’t do that. He knows he can’t do it because I’ve asked him to do it and he struggled with it. But writing prose and then putting it into an essay, writing an essay and putting it into song form works absolutely brilliantly.

Peter: It’s fascinating doing these interviews together because obviously we all, you know, me and Gareth are actually within a fairly theoretical stone’s throw of each other. We’re not too far away, but Dave’s in Lanzarote, Tim’s in Texas, and we never meet. And even the four of us have never met. The three of us have, but the four of us have never met.

And when you do these things, obviously, I get the lyrics and I get told what to sing. And understand it in a literal sense of what the lyrics are. And I sing them to the best of my ability and I put all the emotion in that I can, which I would do for any performance.

But sometimes there’s lots of little things that we don’t all know. There’s things that come out in these interviews, which are really fascinating. And interesting, you know, about Brad’s prose and stuff, because, you know, Dave, you’ve adapted Brad’s lyrics for all of the albums, haven’t you?

Dave: Not for all of them, I haven’t. I didn’t really adapt anything to the first one. The second one was as written by him; I just added a few little bits to it and I added “The Burning Flame.”

It was on the third one that we started moving things around a little bit. “Still Point” was normal. The last track, “Whispers in Space,” was as it came to me. But there was a couple of others. What was it … ? I can’t remember the names of titles now.

Pete: It makes for great lyrics, though, because…

Dave: It does.

Pete: Oh, yeah. As a lyricist, well, as a songwriter, I think lyricists are probably a bit grand, but I write lyrics. And, you know, even now, in my 40s, I have this pull, this need to write.

It’s almost like, when you read back the lyrics sometimes, it’s like a birthday card greeting. It’s like… And it’s that rhyming couplets thing. And sometimes I think, “Oh, God, that’s so banal,” you know.

Whereas, well, either through Brad’s own style or from you sort of moving things around, what you end up with is – you don’t get these constant rhyming couplets, or sometimes just even lyrical snatches of stuff that just seems to be right out of left field. But it makes for really, so many inspiring lyrics in all the albums, and I think in this one, especially. So that’s just really interesting.

And I think, Dave, your lyrics that you wrote for “Harder To See” and “Rewind” fit right in. Just briefly, what were the sparks for those?

Dave: “Harder To See” was weird because I was on a vacation, and I’m a terrible sleeper on vacations. I hate different beds, and I couldn’t sleep. And I was awake at one o’clock in the morning, and I was just lying there trying to think, trying to get myself to sleep, and thinking of things through my head. And this little couplet thing of “you do this, I do that,” but rhyming it. So “You take it, I’ll break it, you fix it.”

And that was going through my head, and I had about four or five of them. So I got up, and I quickly got pen and paper and started writing them down and got about three quarters of the way through the song and thought I was a bit tired, then I went to sleep; finished it off in the morning. And it didn’t mean anything to me at the time when I was writing it, but when you look back on it now, it’s obviously somebody with a bit of angst that wants to prove themselves but probably is pretty inadequate to do it. And so that’s what that song was about. But that just came about I was just playing about with words.

Pete: A bit Freudian!

Gareth: Yeah. [Laughs]

Dave: “Rewind” is totally different. “Rewind” is the story of me going to see Genesis do The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway tour in 1975, and not being able to remember too much about it, apart from the Slipperman costume. There was lots of lights. You know, obviously I knew what they played because I know the album. But I couldn’t remember who I went with, how I got there, how we got back home. I couldn’t remember anything else about the day.

And so I just felt in my mind, “Wouldn’t it be great if you could rewind back and actually relive something and see it all over again rather than watching it on YouTube?”

Where did that playout on “Rewind” come from? It’s so left field as to what came from before, but it’s so perfect at the same time.

Dave: I was mucking about with some synthesizer sounds and patches. Funny enough, I can remember when I did it because it was actually labelled in me files as Christmas Day 2024, I believe it was. I must have had a rough Christmas.

And I was playing about with that. And it actually had something on the beginning to it, but we didn’t like what was on the beginning. But that end bit was really nice. But it was just synthesizers, just bubbling about and making noises and things. And then I hand it over to Gareth, and Gareth puts about 24 tracks of EBow guitar on it.

Gareth: It’s only the right thing to do.

Dave: All right. It might have been 22 tracks of EBow guitar on it. [Pete laughs.] And then it stayed as it was like that for a long time. And then Tim put some drums on it. When Tim did his drums, he’s got some cymbals and swells and things. And then last minute, we find out that a man who couldn’t previously play the flute can now play the flute. And so put some flute pieces on it!

That’s Pete, by the way. Tell us about how you learned to play the flute. Well, you didn’t learn to play it. You got a new mouthpiece, didn’t you?

Pete: Yeah. I wanted to play flute forever. And every time I tried to play one, I just cannot get a sound out of it. I can’t quite [inaudible]

Gareth: Pete, you’ve gone really quiet.

Pete: How’s that?

Gareth: That’s much better.

Pete: My face, you get a close-up of my forehead.

Gareth: We can’t see you anyway.

Pete: You can’t see me anyway?

Gareth: No.

Pete: Oh, OK. Never mind. So I wanted to play the flute for years. And I just couldn’t get a sound out of it. I could get the fingering but I literally couldn’t get the thing to make a noise. And I was talking to John Hackett last year at [art gallery & performance space]Trading Boundaries. And he told me about this newish invention called the flip head mouthpiece, which is basically a mouthpiece with a fipple, like a recorder mouthpiece. And it goes onto a regular flute. And creates a fipple for a flute. So you have to hold the flute straight down rather than sideways. Well, that doesn’t bother me, because I’m used to doing that with saxophones and all the rest of it. So yeah, I’ve finally been able to get a note out of the flute.

And I’m not very good at the fingering. But luckily, this end section of “Rewind” was around a C chord, which is the basic fingering of a flute anyway. So I was able to contribute some trills and stuff like that to it. And get my first flute credit on that song. So that was nice. It just shows you, as going back to what Dave said earlier about these things take time.

I think I first got a couple of songs to do at the end of 2024. It was “A View,” I think, that I first did back then. And as you say, “Christmas Day 2024” was the working title of the end section of “Rewind.” So yeah, that’s, what’s that now? A year and a half. But it was going on before then. So these things take time. And we’ve all got schedules.

And it’s a bit like herding cats at times, isn’t it? Trying to get us all to get our parts in and stuff. So it just shows you that these things, you know, they take a bit of time to create. But hopefully it will be something worth remembering.

Gareth: I was just going to say before you move on, that those two songs are really good examples of the collaborative approach I was talking about.

The first one, “Harder to See,” I pretty much wrote the whole thing as a demo, maybe four years ago or something, maybe even five years ago. And it had never been turned into a song yet. And I didn’t know how to make it into a song and sent it to Dave. And as he usually does, he came back with some lyrics and a melody. And suddenly this half-written song that I’d had on my hard drive for a couple of years became an actual song. And one surprising thing about that song is nobody yet has picked up that I completely ripped off Radiohead for the verse chords. But I thought I’d let you in on that.

Oh, OK.

Gareth: And the other one, the “Rewind” song was another one where I demoed the song up to the end of the first part before the second part you just asked about, which is all the dreamy, Tangerine Dream-y bit. I demoed the whole thing and sent it to Dave. And it came back not only with a brilliant concept for a song, because I love the idea of kind of losing track of your memories, but still remembering some of them, but forgetting the details. That’s a great idea for a song. But also with a great melody. And then Pete really helped out with some of the backing vocals that really strengthened the melody on that. And it was just between all of us, it was a really good collaboration, I think. And really, for me, that exemplifies why the Bardic Depths worked so well for me.

Makes sense. And again, there’s a lot of varied colors on this album. Dave, you mentioned that you’re getting more into a symphonic, orchestral kind of vibe. And every once in a while, there’s an echo of other artists on certain tracks. Not naming any names, but it’s like, “Oh, a bit of 12-string, that’s kind of cool.” And then there’s some Mellotron, “Fallen Leaves,” “October Sun” are like that. I mean, are those kind of happy accidents or deliberate homages, or you don’t realize where it came from until later, or just kind of, “Oh, okay”?

Gareth: Well, I mean, the 12-string is just a sound I really like. And when you play it in a certain style, it ends up sounding like a certain band or two. So you can’t really avoid that. It’s just a sound I really, really like. I think I like 70s sounds, particularly as my guitar playing approach has a lot of 70s sounds about it. Again, I won’t tell you all my influences, but they’re there to be spotted.

Pete: It’s not everyone that can play a 12-string well either. And I think you really can.

Dave: So yeah, I’d agree with that. Here’s a question for you, Richard, because you’re the guy that pointed out that there was a lot of 70s classic rock on the album. And you’ve mentioned “Fallen Leaves.” “Fallen Leaves” is a definite homage to something, okay? And we deliberately did it. I deliberately wanted this. Who do you think it’s to?

Well, I heard Genesis, and I heard some Big Big Train in there, basically. But beyond that, I don’t have my track notes here, so I can’t remember exactly. But I wouldn’t be surprised if I was completely wrong.

Dave: It’s mainly in the vocals.

Hmm. Who sings on that? Remind me.

Dave: Pete goes, la-li-la-di-da, la-la-la-di-da, la-la.

Pete: Do-do-do-do-do.

Dave: It’s a song without words, basically, yeah.

Well, the thing that pops into my head is a bit from [Genesis’] “Cinema Show,” before the Tiresias part.

Dave: A little bit, but no, it was mainly, it was David Crosby.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s the CSN track I’d forgotten about.

Dave: Yeah, there’s a song “Tree Without Leaves,” they called it? And so we took “Fallen Leaves;” again, it’s another Gareth song. There was going to be some vocal on it, with some lyrics that never came about. And I was listening to it and thinking, wouldn’t it be great if it sounded a bit Crosby, Stills and Nash? And that’s when Pete did his little bit on it. The end bit definitely is Big Big Train, the da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. That’s definitely Big Big Train, because we even called it the Big Big Train ending.

Gareth: Do not tell them!!

And then that got turned into another track too, didn’t it?

Dave: Well, yeah, because “Fallen Leaves” … “From Empty Trees,” the actual titles merge into each other. And Pete took that song and turned it into a really sort of up-tempo melody that we still can’t recognize. That’s where that came from. Which was great, because to have Pete actually write a song for us as well on the album was a joy. It was brilliant.

And that’s kind of the proggiest moment, I felt like.  It’s like, “Ooh, cool, here comes the Moog!”

Pete: Well, Gareth said early on in the process, perhaps revealing more than we should, but Gareth said to me, “Are you interested in doing any writing for this album, Pete?” And I just sort of went, “No, no, you tell me what to sing and I’ll sing it.” Just because of the burnout thing that we were talking about earlier.

So as things went on, we had this album and I really liked the fact that we were leaning into this sort of dreamy, pastoral type thing with tracks like “Islands” and “Fallen Leaves” and “Rewind.” But the consensus seemed to be that we could do with something that contrasted a bit and woke people up a bit at this strategic point.

And I felt, I don’t know if there was, but I felt there was a hint being cast out, with Gareth still thinking, “Any ideas, Pete?”

Gareth: Oh, yeah, it was very definite. It was like, “Put your finger up, come on, we need another track. Get off your arse!”

Pete: So, yeah, I took the ending, I started with the ending of “Fallen Leaves” and I just thought, wouldn’t it be great if we had this quiet sort of intro thing and then it went into this big, slightly more bombastic thing, which is kind of how I envisaged it. But in the end, we kind of split them up just because it textured the album a bit better. And I still think that most of it, most of it was Gareth’s work. I just repurposed it, really.

But yeah, it was an instrumental. And the great thing about instrumentals, as I’ve said many times elsewhere, is that for me, instrumentals and tunes come fairly easy. Lyrics are more difficult. And especially these days, I find myself really searching for lyrics and trying to, “What can I say that I haven’t already said?” And instrumentals are great for that. So, yeah, I got really inspired quite quickly to do this and I did a demo version.

And I think it was one of the last things we finished, wasn’t it? But, you know, Gareth added some stuff to it with a guitar that I hadn’t really thought of. And then Dave played, because I play keyboard, all the keyboards on this one, but Dave did a great bass line. And then I think the last thing to come on was Tim’s drums. And, you know, when I heard that mix with Tim’s drum take on it, I thought, “Wow, yeah, this is really great.”

Yeah, it pops out in a really powerful way. And like you say, it sets the rest of that album, that more dreamy vibe into context.

Gareth: It’s going to be an LP as well, so this is the opening track to Side 2, which is just what you need. You know, turn the record over and bam, it comes out the speakers! It’s perfect.

Yep, yep. Heading into the home stretch, you’ve been working hard for this particular release to gauge demand in advance for the vinyl that you’re talking about, for the CD, as well as to publicize it. Talk about the balancing act you’ve had to do this time around because [as] independent musicians, it’s just getting harder and harder to get the music you love out there.

Dave: It really is.

Gareth: I was just going to say, it is very difficult because any time you order too many copies of anything you don’t sell, you end up spending money you’re not earning. And, you know, you have boxes of CDs or records or whatever it is gathering dust. [Laughs]

But, you know, at the same time, you have to be optimistic because we all knew this was our best record that we’d done together. And because every time we released something, interest grew. So we were confident that a lot of people would be interested in hearing this. We’ve got Prog Magazine sharing the news and getting behind us. And people like Gary Foster playing on his radio show again, he’s got really strong reach on his show. So I think we were confident that we’d do all right.

But working together with Richard Swan from Wild Thyme Records has been great because he puts out all the Solstice records, for example, and he’s doing the new John Mitchell record. So he’s got a really solid base of artists he’s working with. It’s quite a catch to be on the same label. So once you realise that’s happening, you know, you’re definitely going to be OK to sell a few of these things once it gets to that point.

Dave: It was quite difficult to gauge, really, because up until about six months before we put everything together, we didn’t have any idea of what our distribution was going to be. Apart from we knew it was going to go on to Bandcamp. Because for the previous three albums, obviously, we’ve worked with Robin Armstrong and Robin Armstrong had a distribution through his Gravity Dream records. But of course, this time around, we didn’t work with Robin, not because we didn’t want to or not because Robin didn’t want to. It was just a mutual agreement that he didn’t have time to work with us and he had other things to do. So we had to make plans to go on our own. We had to formulate a plan and do something that we’d never, ever done before. We had no idea how to go about this because it had all been done for us previously.

So we knew we were going to go on Bandcamp. We knew we wanted to release it on vinyl, but the issue here was that we didn’t know whether or not we would have the amount of volume to actually afford to do it, because it’s not cheap to knock out 100 copies of vinyl or even 200 copies or whatever. So we had to gauge how many we thought we would sell before we did that. We weren’t even thinking about doing CDs either, until I found a company that could manufacture and distribute for us at the same time. And that was a godsend, finding that, because that’s actually going to finance getting the vinyl out. Bandcamp’s obviously going to help towards that as well.

The thing is, we’re not going to sell this time as much as what we sold the last time. And we know that for a fact before we even start, because you’ve got the new European postage thing. where everything gets charged an extra three Euros because it’s coming from the UK into Europe. So that puts a lot of people off.

Sending stuff to America is hugely expensive. And that’s putting a lot of people off. So we’re having to do it through Band Wagon, who are great. And we’re having to just know that we’re not going to sell as much as what we did last time. And at the moment, the figures are showing that. But that’s the trials and tribulations of an independent band these days, that it’s not the same as what it was even three years ago. But we’ll manage.

But what we have done is we’ve cut out a lot of our overheads. And we’ve done everything in house. If we could do it ourselves, we did it.

Pete: Yeah. And I don’t know if I’ve got anything to add to that, apart from [how] Facebook and social media, you know, they can they can be a curse. But at the moment, you know, it’s kind of a blessing because when we do a post about where to get the album, I think there’s about seven or eight links on there now, isn’t it? 

Dave: It’s quite a few, yeah.

Pete: Bandcamp, CD for the UK, CD out of the UK, the vinyl, the vinyl from out of the UK. It’s like, you don’t just have one place where you can get everything from, there’s about seven or eight different places. And thank goodness, we can contain all that in the social media posts.

I said this to [independent artist] John Holden the other day:  “You know, I’m kind of I’m kind of glad I came into the social media thing when I did with Tiger Moth Tales,” even though I’m not actually very good at it, I’m pretty crap at the marketing and stuff. And I think this is a problem a lot of musicians have because your brains are wired the way to make the music not to sell the damn thing. I’m kind of glad I came in when I did 2014, 2015. Because you can see how the algorithms and stuff are changing this year by year. And I imagine, for somebody that’s just coming into this now, brand new, as it were, it’s very hard to sort of pitch things right and, and get things noticed.

So – I mean, this is mostly Dave and Gareth’s work – I’ll say the promotion and stuff like that have done a fantastic job and, and, you know, all power to them.

Yes, I think it’s just true, the media, the major platforms are trying to keep you inside their walled gardens as much as they can. And any link out just seems to get shut down. But again, as you say, all of you guys came into the business when you were still able to get your product out that way. And it turned out, that’s a good thing, as things tighten up that you’ve got a base to work from already.

Hitting the countdown here, so I’ve got to say, again, Some Things Are Worth Remembering is absolutely both my favorite Bardic Depths album, and it’s definitely on my “best of” list this year. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a real contender for the top favorite at the end of the year. So congratulations, guys. It’s a great album. I’m really looking forward to getting my CD and wish you all the best. So bye-bye. Thanks, guys.

Dave: Are we done?

Yes, we are done. Thank you.

Gareth: Thanks, Richard.

Dave: Really appreciate it. Cheers, mate. Thanks.

Cheers to all of you too. Take care.

Pete: We forgot to tell people where to get it!

I’ll make sure to drop that in.

Dave: Richard knows where to get it.

I’ll be sure to drop it all in. Thanks, guys.

Pete: Thanks ever so much. Cheers!

Gareth: Cheers, Richard.

Dave: Thanks, Richard.

Have a good!

— Rick Krueger