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I'm the most introverted person you will ever meet. And like most men, I'm grossly incompetent at sharing my emotions.

Some of my friends at school used to take great pleasure watching me misread situations and misunderstand social cues. Looking back, I can think of several occasions when opportunities were presented to me, only for them to go over my head. I'd realise my mistake weeks later in hindsight and I'd lose sleep over it for months.

Loud & Clear is every bit a love song as it is an instruction manual on how to deal with me in social situations. I might be slow, and miss a lot, and ramble on about the 3 topics I obsess over, and lose focus, and wonder what the song is playing in the background, or what's for dinner, and I'm no longer sure where this sentence is going. But I like how the song turned out, so here it is on my EP.

"Summer" came from one night when I was booked to play covers in a new Belfast bar. Their grand opening was scuppered mainly by their lack of any form of marketing strategy beforehand. The 5 or 6 blow ins during my 3 hours there arrived and left sporadically, leaving me with plenty of rest time between the 30 minutes of total singing time I wound up with.

The majority of the evening I spent chatting with the lady behind the bar (who, like me, also had nothing to do). It turned out that she grew up in the same place as I did, at the foot of Cave Hill in Newtownabbey. The funny thing was, even though she was about 10 years older than me, everything she described about her childhood was identical to my own.

She described how she'd stay out playing with her friends until it got too dark so see. The houses there back on to a farm with lots of trees and open fields. Like her, we used to hop over a friend's back fence and go exploring for the day. There was a lot of weird stuff and structures around there, that I'm still not 100% sure what it was all for. We were terrified of the cows, but should have been a lot more cautious of our various attempts at tree houses that disintegrated under us.

For as precious as I thought my childhood was, it was funny to hear someone with almost the exact same memories as me. It got me thinking about the friends I've lost touch with, either because I don't see them as often, or because some of them were people's cousins who only visited occasionally, or some of them who it's been so long that I can't even remember their name.

It's reassuring to remember a point in life when we could all just kill time together, talking rubbish and telling ghost stories. Back when the only thing we had to worry about was getting home before dinner had gotten cold. Good times.

My World holds a lot less hope to it than the overall sound of it suggests. It's a culmination of sayings and traits either my friends or I have shared in the panic before realising you've been dumped.

You can raise your partner to an unrealistic pedestal through misplaced infatuation, while they might not feel the same way about you. In the worst case, it leads to a reliance that this person is the only thing in the world that matters, or that you'll amount to nothing without them.

There's always a way out from this mindset, however long it takes. It's not always easy to see what the best course of action is. Reaching out for help can feel impossible, like an admission of weakness, or acceptance of a loss that you don't want to face. Every person is defined by themselves just as much as the people around them, and it's situations like this you'll realise how much your friends and family care about you. Spending time with them is as important as spending time alone, coming to terms with it all.

Everybody has their flaws. Nobody is superhuman (except Marcus Rashford). Some people can't be forgotten, but the best we can do is appreciate the better moments for what they were, and disregard the plans that would have only blown up in the long run. Also, try remembering them at their most hungover. That always helps.

This is the oldest song on the EP. I wrote it during a particularly thrilling lecture at uni, about binary code. Needless to say, I didn't learn a lot about binary code in those 2 hours, but I did come out the other side with a head full of lyrics. I didn't want to risk writing anything down while people were in view of my notepad (the lyrics are pretty weird), so I replayed them over and over in my head out of fear I'd forget them, then wrote them down in a toilet cubicle afterwards.

Post-school life is a difficult time that I don't think gets enough sympathy. You've got a lot going on all at once all of a sudden. The routine of school was exhausting and claustrophobic, and you definitely felt (or at least acted) like you'd outgrown it by the age of 15, but now that it's gone, suddenly you've got all this time to manage, with nobody accountable for it but yourself. You want to achieve all the things you expected you would, but at the same time you're at your spottiest, your social skills only work within the boundaries of your school clique, and you're still not 100% sure how to talk to girls.

The Lighthouse was a very unsubtle analogy for how I was feeling at the time. I wanted independence, and to make something of myself, but I was worried that in doing that, I was leaving people and a part of myself behind. It's a real "nothing ventured, nothing gained" time in your life that you rarely get the opportunity to do again.

I've always been a victim of wandering concentration, which is great for songwriting, but less so when it's distracting you from more urgent responsibilities (like learning binary code). I sometimes feel as though songwriting is about merchandising the most marketable sections of random thought you have throughout the day. But most of the time I worry I'm just reassuring myself with plans that I'll either forget, or lose the self-assurance to see through to completion.

Our tragic hero in The Lighthouse goes through an entire lifecycle of a wife, children and a new place to call home, before realising it's all a complete delusion. For a moment he was happy and had everything he'd ever wanted, but the illusion evaporates as soon as he realises his imaginary wife can't speak. He's right back where he started again, wondering if he should never have ventured into the unknown at all.