Tim Pare left his broken life – long-term girlfriend, job, and house in Sheffield, England – in 2004 and moved to Shandong, China where he would teach English and fall in love with the country and her people. A year later Tim was on his way home, taking the Trans-Siberian Railway. Deep in the forests between Vladivostock and Moscow, 60 Russian conscripts from Siberia and Kamchatka got on the train. It was while he was surrounded by violent, barbaric, drunken Russian conscripts and with a knife to his neck that Tim’s debut EP/short album Trans-Siberian Express was born. These were, after all, desperate, sexually-deprived, testosterone-flooded killers in need of distraction.

Trans-Siberian Express is not as mind-blowing or exciting as it’s birth would imply. Tim specializes in stripped down, bare, life-experience and emotion filled acoustic pop. His world-weary lyrics are straight from the hip and his warm, breathy vocals lend themselves to the heartrending feel of this debut. His own natural gentleness and geniality come through in his lyrics, “love I caught you looking at me… last night when you thought I was asleep”.

Trans-Siberian Express has a unique intimacy and personal-confession feel, with just a whiff of religious melodrama. His broken heart, love affair songs are touching and honest without sentimentality and this raises them above others who follow the picking-through-the-debris-of-my-wasted-life genre. And now Tim is going “band”.

Feeling he has explored the singer/songwriter thing in depth, Tim is putting together a band in London and already has several demos ready for the new crew. He has kindly allowed us to share one of these demos with you. “Still In Love” is a moody track with Tim’s still honest lyrics with a slightly more raw edge. Here he loses the intimacy of Trans-Siberian Express but manages to keep the raw unsentimental emotion.

You can hear several tracks from Trans-Siberian Express at Tim’s MySpace space.