phil anthony

I've been writing songs and playing  since I was 14. Over the years I've written at least 200 songs but it wasn't until the late 90's that I started to get interested in recording. In the late 90's I produced my very first praise and worship album on cassette using an old fostex 8 track.  There were many old songs which, after hearing in playback, didn't sound good enough to record so I discarded those.

In 1997 I took up recording seriously. I used our spare bedroom as a studio. My wife soon put a stop to that.

In 2000 I built a recording studio, sold the old fostex and upgraded to a hard disk recorder. It was then that I began writing two albums, one of them was Sierra Cruise in Blue. At that time I had almost no instruments at all. I had an old Ibenez, a Les Paul copy and one daggy speaker with a cheap valve amp.

I completed my debut album in 2006. It took me around 3 years to record it and get it to a standard I was happy with. It was during this project that I began to learn the skills required for getting a good recording. It took a long time to get to know the computer instead of the hard disc recorder, and how to get good sounds. 

In the Early 2000's I got a Korg keyboard and was so impressed with the sounds and by now I had upgraded to a more powerful PC. I was told I was one of the 5 people to have a computer like this at that time. It was here that I started to experiment with Sci Fi rock and thoroughly enjoyed it. I created the album Creating Worlds. It has many synthesiser sounds but not a lot of lead guitar. There were times when I wondered if it was a good idea to produce this album because it's not my favourite genre and I'm not planning to do another like this.

Over the next years I began to listen to a lot of artists who were playing a genre I'd never heard of called Jazz Rock Fusion. I became very interested in the genre. I listened to this genre of music for about 2 years when I finally began to understand the music. It was here that I began to write my own Jazz Rock Fusion instrumentals. I released my favourite album so far called Thermionic Muse. 

At this point I bought my first fender strat and loaded it with some nice vintage pickups. It gave me the tone I was looking for. Equipment was slowly becoming upgraded to better amps, better accessories and a whole lot of new skills. It started to become easier for me to spend less time on recording as I documented how to get the right sounds. Putting an album together became much easier. I wrote and recorded this instrumental in about 14 months and absolutely enjoyed every minute of it. I have many more songs in this genre which I intend to release in the future.

Around 2017 I released my first vocal album Bluestone, a blues rock album with Christian themes. Once again I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. At some stage in the future I'm going to release a Bluestone Vol. 2. 

Right now I am working on an allegory by John Bunyan called the Pilgrims progress, both part A and B. The inspiration for this album came by listening to an American artist Neal Morse. An album I purchased called Sola Scriptura. After listening to it for a while I had a desire to write my own concept album. I was sitting in front of the PC in our lounge and I said to myself, (but it was also a prayer) ‘But what am I gonna do?’ That's when in a flash, The Pilgrims progress came to mind, and I thought, 'We've got that book on our mantlepiece'. I began forming my own lyrics based on the book in my favourite genre, progressive rock. This album includes not just electric band sounds but also there are classical movements and scales in full instrumentation. 

I plan to release these albums late 2025 or early 2026.