"In 2005, having decided to approach Gil Scott-Heron to suggest that we made a record, I stopped listening to any of his previous output. This was to avoid feeling intimidated by the weight of Gil's musical history, and by the sheer quality of the 14 studio albums he'd released since 1970.

Part of my initial suggestion to Gil was that we recorded sparse, stripped down versions of his old songs. We both thought that might make an intriguing album. So we started off recording versions of some of Gil's repertoire, just voice and piano. But our album gradually evolved into something different - "I'm New Here", which as the title suggested, didn't touch on any of Gil's previous recordings (except for "Your Soul And Mine", which is a re-imagining of "The Vulture" from Gil's 1970 debut LP "Small Talk at 125th and Lennox").

I didn't pay much attention to the acoustic versions of Gil's older repertoire that we had recorded, as I was so focused on our making an entirely new album. We didn't make the album we set out to; we made something different.

In November 2011, six months after Gil died, I sat down to listen to the whole of Gil's back catalogue, on vinyl, album by album, chronologically. It's an incredible body of work; 13 albums between 1970 and 1982, and then 2 ("Spirits" and "I'm New Here") until Gil passed in 2011. I did this as a sort of meditative exercise, for the joy of sitting and listening to Gil, now that I was no longer getting to hear his voice down the phone from Harlem. Richard Russell, XL Recordings, London, 2014

1. Did You Hear What They Said? 4.02
2. Better Days Ahead 4.40
3. Household Name (Interlude) 0.12
4. Your Daddy Loves You 4.06
5. Changing Yourself (Interlude) 0.10
6. Pieces of a Man 4.36
7. Enjoying Yourself (Interlude) 0.13
8. Alien (Hold On to Your Dreams) 3.01
9. Before I Hit the Bottom (Interlude) 0.21
10. 95 South (All of the Places We've Been) 3.12
11. The Other Side 3.04
12. The On/off Switch (Interlude) 0.26
13. Blue Collar 3.54
14. On Bobby Blue Bland (Interlude) 0.17