PETE//HUEY

Category: 2026

  • 40×40 // 21 – Mulholland Drive (2012)

    It would be stupid to try and tell you that the music you’re listening to is like nothing you’ve ever heard before. The songs on the Gaslight Anthem’s latest album are three or four minutes long, most of them, and they’re played on loud electric guitars, and there are drums, and to be honest, if you haven’t heard anything like this before, then you’re probably listening to the wrong band anyway.

    So writes Nick Hornby on the liner notes for the 2012’s Handwritten, an album which serves as an unflashy advertisement for why long-play records are not simply a collection of desperate tracks thrown together, but rather (at their best) a narrative arc strewn across anything up to and around 70 minutes of singing and playing. I could’ve picked any number of tracks from this album at random, but I’ve plumped for Mulholland Drive primarily because the lead guitar riff at the end is simple, but a lot of fun, to roll your fingers over.1 Four minutes of tight rock, get in and get out.

    I used to have a back-and-forth with someone about which band would be the most fun to be in. My stock answer, when I thought I was being pretentious (!), was Dave Matthews Band – a jam band, playing the same songs a different way every night. But actually, I have neither the stamina, talent, or hand span for that kind of thing. The better answer is The Gaslight Anthem. The songs are good; they are crafted to be short, with no baggy-ness; and most middling musicians can play them. That’s not meant as a slight, but a testament to musicians who write good songs and play them well.

    In this respect, The Gaslight Anthem are spiritual heirs to their hero, Bruce Springsteen – there’s a great clip of the Boss joining them to play their first big single, ’59 Sound at Glastonbury years ago,2 and the mood generally fits well with the Boss when he’s in his Born to Run mood. It’s clever, but not showy; the words are carefully chosen – so many literary references – but not pretentious. It’s good, healthy rock music for a Friday afternoon, and I, for one, am here for it.

    1. I like this album because the theme of songs and songwriting, and what that gives and takes from the writer, runs throughout. Tracks like “45”, Handwritten, and Too Much Blood put the theme front and centre – with that it mind, it makes so much sense that they got the author of High Fidelity on board. Someone’s posted the full liner notes here. ↩︎
    2. Found it. Love the look on lead singer Brian Fallon’s face throughout, having the time of his life. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 20 – Decatur, or Round of Applause for Your Step-Mother! (2005)

    Some time early in 2014, after we’d been away, come back, and slowly slotted back into a life that had only just been getting started in Belfast. At some point, Andrew got in touch with a booking slot for a folk night he was hosting downtown. I think I was probably very flattered – I had not played out and about for a few years – and quickly got in touch with friend Robin. Get the old band back together? Sort of? A few covers, a few originals, sure it would be fun.1

    I have three core memories of the evening in question. The first, sitting (why did we sit?) behind the mics, looking out, thinking, ‘This isn’t working.’ The second is glancing over to Andrew, behind the sound desk, who looked like a man questioning his life choices. And the third was plopping down in a seat beside Hannah, who had kindly called down with a friend to check the night out, and responding to her consoling kind words with a, ‘I think I’m done.’ And I was. I’ve not played my own stuff anywhere since.

    Yet, on reflection, there were many redeeming factors. One, the people mentioned above are all awesome. Two, the symmetry of playing a final gig with Robin, having also played the first one with him all those years before, was perfect. When I had reached out to him, I’d said something like, ‘You pick a couple.’ We had a ton of fun practicing in the caravan parked up at the house which he was renovating at the time, trying to absolutely nail the harmonies on Sufjan Stevens’ Decatur – what could be more enjoyable?

    It’s often the simply little songs that are the most interesting – I was just listening to Damien Dempsey’s magical cover of A Rainy Night in Soho, a song with a three chord loop that stretches on and on, and yet as the layers build is (I think) captivating. Decatur is similar: in one sense, its meanders along for three minutes, but as it does so it is both slightly ethereal and, mainly, fun.

    When did music stop being fun?

    Well, it wasn’t fun that night in 2014. ‘I had my fill, and I know how bad it feels.’ But these days, listening to various sounds rattling around this house as the kids hammer on this or attempt to tinkle on that, it might be coming back around again.

    1. Was footering around with hard drives yesterday and dug out this. Some time in the late 2000s, we were hanging out and wrote and recorded a song called Evergreen. I hate listening to my strained voice, but Robin’s guitar sounds lovely. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 19 – Dare You To Move (2000)

    Child #1 had a birthday (in the middle of exams this week), and amongst other things, his gifts included what has now become routine – a wadge of second hand CDs, sourced online, filling out his catalogue. Someone can be proud of their children for many things, but his growing ability behind a drum kit, and the fact that, when quizzed who is favourite band are, on many given days he might say Jimmy Eat World, reassure me that, as a parent, we’ve gotten some things alright.

    He is – I am convinced – the foremost expert in the land on something a little more niche: the oeuvre of alt rockers Switchfoot, and it began with the discovery on our shelves of their best-known album The Beautiful Letdown, including the reworking of their best-known song: Dare You To Move. I thought about some of the other awesome tracks Switchfoot have recorded, but its hard to get past it.1

    The Beautiful Letdown has had so many plays, we are genuinely on our third copy of the disc – the first being my own, from twenty-something years ago. We – he – now possesses everything they’ve committed to plastic. So in honour of birthday week, it had to be Switchfoot.

    It didn’t start there though. It started with Colin Buchanan, then Semisonic, as mentioned previously. It progressed through a short-lived family room routine, dancing around to the absolutely sensational Gregory Porter jam, Liquid Spirit, then later into a mini-U2 obsession and finally indoctrination with John Mayer and Jimmy Eat World. Been trying to get him into The Gaslight Anthem just this week.

    They say your children are the distillation of your best and worst traits. If one of my worst is early-century soft rock, then its absolutely true.

    1. I have a soft spot many of their tracks, including Ammunition off the same album, and from much later, the re-recording of their album track Won’t Let You Go featuring Lauren Daigle. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 18 – Closing Time (1998)

    A mention of SongExploder a couple of weeks’ ago1 brought to mind the episode of that great podcast series which is the favourite of mine (and I expect, a lot of others) – where Semisonic’s Dan Wilson relates the process of writing their anthemic hit, Closing Time, with a life-affirming coda.

    Weirdly, for a period of time circa 2020, Semisonic’s album Feeling Strangely Fine became the one on permanent rotation in our family car,2 as Child #1 began making his way through his father’s CD collection. Just as COVID hit, it was nearing ubiquity, Late in 2020, when their father was often busy multi-tracking audio recordings for church services (remember when that was briefly an apparent necessity?) we had a sidebar recording children’s songs for our own amusement – children’s songs, and a full-band composite of Closing Time.3

    Until then, although I like Semisonic generally, I probably primarily associated this song with its repeated use at the end of live events, circa 2010–11. But the aforementioned SongExploder episode takes it to another level. Dan Wilson is one of the more prolific modern American songwriters, but he seems OK with this one being his epitaph.

    On the YouTube video, one of the top comments says, ‘Cheer up – in only 64 years it’ll be the ’90s again.’ Sometimes it seems weird that Gen Z and Gen Alpha seem to be developing a weird hazy, warm feeling towards that decade – but the rock scene, from the grunge to the pop, was absolutely sensational.

    In the next entry, we’ll pick up on the theme of children nicking their father’s CDs, but as an entry into grown-up music – this one was pretty good.

    1. See track 16. ↩︎
    2. …displacing, after more than a year, Colin Buchanan’s Colin’s Favourites, Vol. 1, most of which I could play and sing from memory at that point. Colin Buchanan probably won’t get an entry in this series, but is worthy of a mention: he will be best-known to the widest audience as the co-writer on a popular Christian worship song, Jesus, Strong & Kind (and I very much value another track also written with Cityalight, The Night Song), but to a significant subset of Christians – particularly Australian ones – he is an absolute phenomenon. A legit country singer-songwriter with a famous Christmas novelty hit, Colin turned to writing Christian music for children in the 1990s and is – and I do not say this lightly, but it is only my opinion – perhaps one of the finest expositors of Biblical theology alive on the earth today, taking deep concepts and recounting them for under-10s with silly voices and guitar riffs. Our family are immensely grateful for all his songs have embedded in our lives, with and without puppet accompaniment. ↩︎
    3. I just booted up the Adobe Audition files out of interest. That is a lot of percussion tracks. ↩︎

  • From bean to cup?

    This is very clever. Frank has launched a mapping web app called ori3.coffee, which represents the connections between coffee producers and roasters. Its niche, beautiful, and I love it.

  • 40×40 // 17 – Emer’s Dream (2008)

    We haven’t had a song by the Frames yet, but we’ve had a few contacts with what I’ll term the GHEU (Glen Hansard Extended Universe) already in this series.1 Today’s is the most explicit yet: the showstopping Emer’s Dream from Colm Mac Con Iomaire’s 2008 solo record, The Hare’s Corner.

    Now, remember: it’s late 2007. KT Tunstall hasn’t yet just been on Jools Holland with the legendary looped performance of Black Horse and the Cherry Tree.2 People – ok, people I know, including me – are taking a long hard look at loop pedals, but we’re still a few years pre-Ed Sheeran, so they aren’t mainstream.3 With no fanfare at all, Colm Mac Con Iomaire came out before the rest of the Frames at a gig in the Grand Opera House in October, and played a few tracks off his soon-to-be released album, running his electric violin through a loop station and creating these gigantic, whirling soundscapes.

    Youtube struggles to capture it, as is so often the case, but the sound created a, ‘take it, take my money’ moment.

    Completely tangentially, writing this has reminded me of perhaps my favourite moment in a rehearsal. For me, rehearsals were always the favourite part of a performance: the moment when a band have started to click, or when a new song gives everyone the ‘oooh, that one’s not awful’ feeling, or just little bits of musical magic. I remember playing at a fundraising concert some time after this,4 and was footling around playing the chord sequence from Emer’s Dream on the piano when friend Hannah, playing violin beautifully in that particular outfit, felt moved to start improvising along off the top of her head. In my very brief time attempting to be a jobbing musician (despite how much I nostalgically wallow in it) I got to try out lots of different things, but that little moment, noodling away in an otherwise empty church space, might be my favourite, as that chord sequences and the violin mixed and rose in the air, never to be contained or repeated.

    1. See entries for the pregap and track 04 for more. ↩︎
    2. The lore around said performance – including Tunstall’s late call-up as a replacement, and borrowed equipment – is almost as good as the song itself. ↩︎
    3. Friend Brian, these days a legit singer-songwriter, was the finest user of a proper loop station that I knew, but he was usually to be found in his student digs diligently mastering John Mayer solos over himself as the backing track. ↩︎
    4. The things you remember. We were supporting a fellow called Gentry Morris that evening, who is a fantastic singer and writer. You should watch him and Stephen Macartney sing his song, Awake, O Sleeper, and then go and listen to his album of the same name. ↩︎

  • The things that stay with you

    A lovely clip from an interview with Ardal O’Hanlon on the Late Late Show, where he reminisces with Patrick Kielty about his recently-deceased father.1 O’Hanlon’s father, the politician and GP Rory O’Hanlon, was not, in his words, the most present due to his tremendous commitments to community and state – but the younger O’Hanlon speaks particularly fondly of the times when, as a child, he was brought along for the house calls.

    I have to admit, this resonates deeply with me. My own father, a vet, was similarly constantly on the go, but I have warm memories of climbing in the car and being taken to all sorts of places: when he was still in practice, sat at tables, drinking juice whilst small pets were examined; perched on the end of a cattle crush, watching the dehorning with increasing disgusted; wedged on top of the wall as a group of men ran the herd through the sheep dip.2 Later, when he worked at the meat plant or for the department, Saturday mornings often meant time wandering around the mart, or memorably once getting to go and literally see the sausages getting made.

    It resonates now because I work in a role, in local church ministry, where you also spend a significant amount of time in people’s homes, and I too sometimes drag my children along. It is a reminder that, as they have already tried to say, they actually enjoy something of these times. I sometimes feel guilty for bringing them, as if they’ll be bored or uninterested, or as if they might need to be shielded from the realities of real life; but I suppose on reflection, there’s something magical about stepping into that grown-up world when you’re little, and there’s also something magical about being invited into it by your parent.

    O’Hanlon connects these times with his own sense of relationship to people; Kielty goes as far to prompt him that he, too, engaged in a type of public service and that may be influenced by his childhood memories. It’s a reminder, too, that no artificial construction or so-called social platform can replace the magic of face-to-face time alongside those who mean the most to you; and that, without the need for extravagant, ‘memory-making’ experiences, there is little that replaces the mundane joy of simply being brought along for the ride.

    1. Around a decade ago or so, a bunch of us happened to see Ardal O’Hanlon doing an afternoon warmup gig for the Galway Comedy Festival – I think there might have been around thirty people squeezed into a tiny room upstairs in the bar, and maybe ten were us rowdies. O’Hanlon was trying out material, opening confessing the bits that didn’t quite work and, in a very meta way, also explaining how he would put the act together for that evening based on what we as an audience were responding to. In person, he seemed exactly as warm and affable as you would imagine, and to be fair to him, the embodiment of what he describes in the clip above. ↩︎
    2. When I was maybe five or six, I famously took a tumble and fell off a wall, rolled across a small bit of yard, and ended up immersed in the tank. I must have been guaranteed mite-free for at least six months afterwards. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 16 – Wait For It (2015)

    There are few pop culture hills worth dying on – but the admission by Lin-Manuel Miranda that he believes he wrote the best songs for the character of Aaron Burr encourages me to make this particular stand: Burr’s searing inner monologue, Wait For It, is the best song in the musical phenomenon Hamilton, and yes, I will die on that hill.1

    It is so significant that when Hrishikesh Hirway’s SongExploder briefly made the jump to Netflix for a (too) limited-run series, Wait For It was the track grabbed out of the zeitgeist to go under the microscope.2

    In the musical’s libretto, it’s perhaps one of only a couple of glimpses into Burr’s otherwise stonewall persona: a moment when the facade drops, and the man’s motivations are exposed.

    Whilst a particular line –

    Death doesn’t discriminate
    Between the sinners and the saints
    It takes and it takes and it takes

    …might be read as exposing a type of fatalism, I have often chosen to read it instead as a tenet of faith – death, which none of us can escape, is not only the great leveller but also a reminder that so many things in this plane of existence, which may seem vital at the time, are just dust.

    1. Allow me to shoehorn in here an honourable mention for the cover, by Ben Folds and Regina Spektor, of Burr’s other moment of vulnerability: Dear Theodosia. ↩︎
    2. The podcast SongExploder is brilliant, and will feature again – the Netflix series can be found here. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 15 – Next Year (1999)

    Inching towards academic deadlines at the end of this month, 40×40 has not been getting the attention I would like. However, setting aside such distractions, and reviewing recent posts, one can spot a minor trend in recent entries which is crying out for resolution – that is, songs that primarily emerged from TV watching habits in the early 2000s.

    A footnote to an earlier post discussed the incredible run that was RTE 2’s (then Network 2) Monday night comedy lineup; today, a tip-of-the-hat is due to the UK’s Channel 4’s morning setup. The weekday early morning run of that time is legendary: on any given morning you could be watching Cheers, Frasier, Friends (heavily edited for the time slot), and if you missed the school bus, King of Queens or Everybody Loves Raymond. However, hang around until later morning and there might be ER, criminally-underrated procedural Without a Trace, and the sweetest of all early 2000s comedy-dramas: Ed.

    Ed remains slightly mythical for having never made it to DVD due to musical rights issues – a trap into which many pre-streaming shows fell.1 A vehicle for future stars Tom Cavanagh and Julie Bowen, the small town aw-shucks-fest mixed schmaltz with belly-laughs, but the soundtrack was a highlight – no more so than the original track for the opening credits: Foo Fighters’ album track, Next Year.

    Aged around 13, I knew Nirvana from my older cousin’s cassette tapes,2 but hadn’t yet discovered the Foos; watching Ed led to purchasing There is Nothing Left to Lose and my mind falling out of my ears.3 Yet, in contrast to most of the album, Next Year is a gentle lyric, wending its way through an ambling tune to create an audio landscape that perfectly fit the TV show it was used to introduce. This track and that album were a gateway into a whole world that part of my nostalgia-tinged brain still lives in. Maybe things will change sometime.

    Maybe next year.

    1. Vulture have a good explainer here. A few years ago, some absolute hero ripped the whole lot from what looks like the broadcast tapes from a local affiliate TV station in the States; the internet overlords have never seen fit to action a takedown, and you can watch the entire run on YouTube with 90s-style VHS flicker. Typical of the era, the finale, four seasons in, is a mess, but the joy along the way is worth it. ↩︎
    2. Like something out of a coming-of-age film, my cousin Seline spent a summer in our house and commandeered my cassette player to blast Nevermind on a daily basis, and her (maybe ten year old?) cousin was absolutely on board. Her most played track was not, as I remember, Smells Like Teen Spirit, but definitely In Bloom. ↩︎
    3. Dave Grohl’s best album. It’s been self-pastiche ever since; often enjoyable, but still a bit of a parody at times. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 14 – These Photographs (2006)

    Whisper it – of all the millennial properties being revived in these current times, the reboot of Scrubs has bucked the trend and been both fresh and familiar in equal measure.1 (Frankly, I’m gutted there are only nine episodes in the first run). Admittedly, I am absolutely the target audience: it first hit TV when I was finishing school,2 and the boxsets came with me through uni (alternating purchases with series of The West Wing).

    Among the many things to like was, famously, the sound tracks, as mentioned in a previous post in this series.3 Music was used both in and out of camera to amazing effect – Colin Hay’s cameo might be the best example. But perhaps the greatest beneficiary was Zack Braff’s bestie, Joshua Radin, whose music is synonymous with some of the shows most famous moments.4 Scrubs, therefore, was also a gateway into Joshua Radin’s music; I was tempted to pick something from his (unusually upbeat) third album, Road to Ride On, but the Scrubs connection anchors us in the first record, and so I’m going for These Photographs.

    Radin specialises in breathy, heart-felt and quiet songs – and he’s very good at it5 – but I often think its a pity as his more up-tempo tracks, primarily limited to his second and third album, very on high quality pop. These Photographs sits somewhere in-between; I’ve always enjoyed the wordplay of the verses, casting various historical literary figures in a way that could feel very heavy-handed, but I think manages to say the right side of sincere. The album, We Were Here, is well worth a spin.

    1. Disney Plus in the UK – I’ve loved it. ↩︎
    2. It was on Channel 4 in the UK, but was also part of a frankly obscene Monday night lineup on Network 2 in Ireland, were us dual-nationals in the north could also tune in to see lots of US comedies weeks ahead of their UK screenings. At one point, the run was something like: That 70s Show, followed by Scrubs, followed by Friends, followed by Father Ted. Today, in a streaming world, no-one would raise an eyebrow, but at the time, there was nothing like it. ↩︎
    3. Let’s shoehorn in two things here: firstly, the show’s theme song itself, Superman by Lazlo Bane, and some lovely banjo; and secondly, you can’t mention Scrubs and music and not take a moment to pour one out for the amazing Sam Lloyd and his a cappella group, The Blanks. ↩︎
    4. Season 3, Episode 14 – ‘My Screw Up’. ↩︎
    5. Paperweight is a good example, from the soundtrack to The Last Kiss, an excellent – and forgotten – genre-twisting rom-com from the Scrubs extended universe. ↩︎