In 1978 while school friends were listening to KISS. Everett’s favourites were film composers John Williams and John Barry. He played the theme to Superman The Movie by ear and performed it at his elementary school with accompaniment from his classmates.

At 48 years of age, this double album had become the culmination of what his 40s had been about, which involved struggle.

In 2009, Everett had finished a Ph.D. in political psychology but didn’t land the academic job and personal validation he had hoped for.  This usurped academic career path has left him with some unresolved emotions.

Everett watched his new newborn children grow for seven years and found parenthood to be a heart-wrenching struggle. In darker moments Everett says: “I often feel trying to be a parent and a partner have brought to the surface the very worst parts of me, or at least the parts I find the hardest to love`’.

Therefore, aged 41, Everett focused on his guitar playing and practiced properly and most of the guitar on his recordings are his playing and the songs were written on guitar.

This album of songs is the expression of Everett’s last few years, haunted by a voice that tells him he came up short of where he supposed to be. Therefore, motivated by that convertible Mini Cooper, Everett still feels like the 9 year old kid who listening to Williams and Barry’s film music. The legacy he would like to leave is beautiful instrumental music for people to discover.

In March 2018, Everett found himself listening to his 22 new songs and realizing the experiences, emotions, watching his children grow, the guitar and piano compositions and practice had all been thrown in and the songs deserve to be heard.

In a review posted on his website is a review of his music project called Kicklighter’s album The Fascinating Thinking Machine contains this quote from Everett saying this goal was to “create an album that literally could have been recorded in 1985, 1989, maybe 1991, and could have been one of the great records of its time, but was lost to time and only just now re-discovered in a vault somewhere.” 

Therefore, Paper Planes: volume 1 Too Much Too Soon is the soundtrack to a found footage film about the last few year’s of a man’s life, as a parent, a musician who was not going to become an academic but instead was going to fulfill his life purpose and leave a legacy of beautiful music with more to follow.  The album’s title track Paper Planes will appear on Volume 2.

Kicklighter website

You can buy Paper Planes Volume 1 on iTunes

Also available on Amazon