'Keep it simple' is about how our social and corporate institutions condense the vast complexity we are faced with into bite sized chunks of banality. It’s a bald faced lie. The anaesthetic society we are embedded in is the best way we have come up with so far to keep billions of souls under some semblance of order, but vast swathes of subjective experience and objective phenomena are left unacknowledged. The song includes a pretty obscure reference to the legendary roswell event, a fixture of UFO folklore. “What you saw was nothing more than a weather balloon”, in the first pre-chorus and “what you saw was nothing more than a rawinsode” in the second, refers to the famous press conference set up by US army 'Top Brass' in July 1947 where Jessie Marcel, the chief intelligence officer of the 509th bomber wing at Roswell army base was paraded in front of the worlds press with pieces of tinfoil and sticks in the hope the world would be dumb enough to buy the line that a well trained top echelon army officer could have made such a blunder as to mistake what they really found with pieces of a weather balloon. Rawinsode is another word for a military weather balloon. Then in 1997 on the 50th anniversary of the Roswell incident with all the attending media focus the Air Force amended the official line by saying the debris was actually part of a secret program called mogul which was a weather balloon with wooden humanoid figures. This is because the roswell incident has been extremely well researched over the years and many eyewitnesses have spoken, and the wooden figures were needed to account for credible eyewitness reports of humanoid figures.

I'm not telling anyone what to believe, I'm simply saying that whatever way you look at it, we live then we die. From beginning to end it’s a total mystery and any attempt to wrap it all up in cellophane and tie it with a pink bow and call it in any way understood is the height of hubris and stupidity. Fifty years later we are still nodding when they say “nothing to see here”, and depriving ourselves of the very aspect of existence that may save us from the inevitable tipping point where the demand of humanity outstrips natures capacity to supply, while we are still locked in our gravity well and dependant on messy and eventually catastrophic means of energy production and distribution.

Keep it simple began with the verse riff in around 2003. It originally belonged in another song which really didn’t go anywhere, but I always liked that verse pattern especially on acoustic guitar you can hear the subtleties in the picking and the pull-offs, it’s a pretty sort of 'play on basic open chords'. As a songwriter or an artist of any kind, your subconscious becomes trained to organize ideas at a subliminal level and release them into the conscious sphere carefully so I guess this is one of those riffs which just popped into my head after a few years of not even thinking about it.

There's a fairly common trick on guitar where you move from D to C to G chords using similar treble notes. One famous example is “sweet home Alabama”. Its not a rip off, more just using an obvious opportunity on the fretboard as many have. So the intro riff which is also a feature of the chorus was tacked on the start and the transition from one to the other kicked the song off.