Category: February 2026

Dr H’s birthday present gift to yours truly in 2007 was a little left-field, but not really: tickets to see Harry Connick, Jr., on his ‘My New Orleans Tour‘, at the Waterfront Hall. Harry Connick became embedded somewhere in my mind from repeat watches of Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner’s great When Harry Met Sally,¹ for which he provided the soundtrack album at age, what… 22?² So off we went to see Harry and marvel at his patented screen-based sheet music system.³

At some point, Harry calls forward trombonist Lucien Barbarin to play a couple of solos. Then Barbarin sits down on the edge of the stage, and sings the old standard Girl of My Dreams, his legs swinging, with a big grin on his face – and had the whole Hall eating out of the palm of his hand. It was sensational, and it looked so easy.

After purchasing the album and scouring its depth, it became clear that Barbarin was an absolute legend of New Orleans music in his own right. To his credit, Harry Connick packed his band out with pros, which either speaks to ego or to respect for the tradition – I’m going to choose the latter. But Barbarin, this tall, gangly, serene gentleman with this unassuming manner and silky voice, stole the show.

He was duking it out with a couple of other New Orleans musicians to make this list – Trombone Shorty⁴ an extremely close number 2 – but my love of this song alone places him on the list. An absolute treat.

1. ‘You’re going to have to find a way to not express every feeling that you have every moment that you have them’ is an accurate summation of my 20s. ↩︎
2. Also, for years he was the official, non-Buble soundtrack to Christmas in our house with Harry for the Holidays. ↩︎
3. You have to remember, kids, this was a couple of years before the iPad launched. Every member of the band had a screen in front of them, Connick had one discreetly on top of the piano, and there was a guy at stage left running everyone’s scores – but crucially, the system was programmed in such a way that each instrument’s score ran simultaneously across each piece of music. And it’s jazz, so they were clearly only paying mild attention to them. Screen-operating tech, you were the true star of the night and I doff my black A/V hat to you, sir. ↩︎
4. Let’s take a minute for Trombone Shorty. This guy was performing on public stages before he was in high school. We saw him first on the Hurricane Katrina-themed Christmas episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. For the couple of years I spent in vans and cars driving to far off work gigs, the whole Backatown album was a mainstay on for months. Hurricane Season is the track to get started with, but also his Tiny Desk Concert is a delight. ↩︎

In moments of darker humour, I have sought to unsettle a person by remarking that, regardless of what opinion they have formed of me thus far, they should know that I was present at the national premiere of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. Reeling from this information may send an individual judging me in a different light, but don’t blame me: blame my (then) long-term girlfriend and her coping mechanisms.

Part of that coping mechanism was, for a time, an attachment to a song that appears near the end of the original Twilight film – Iron & Wine’s quietly epic Flightless Bird, American Mouth.¹

Next week is our fifteenth wedding anniversary², in the twenty-first year of our relationship – but of the handful of songs that I can say with any certainty that my wife actually enjoys, this one is right up there. For our first anniversary, which we celebrated a very long way away from here, her gift was a hand-illustrated card adorned with the lyrics of the song – I was certain I had a photo, but cannot find it.

Our first dance was Come Fly With Me.³ Our first home often reverberated to either Mumford & Sons’ Sigh No More or Paolo Nutini’s Sunny Side Up (also a favourite of her children for a long time).⁴ But Flightless Bird – ostensibly a story about the loss of innocence and the wafer-thin line between dream and failure – remains her theme tune in my head.

For what it’s worth, I think we’ve fallen on the right side so far.

1. I’ve included the track in the body of the article, above, but maybe the best way to enjoy it is through the lens of Song Exploder Episode 243, where Sam Beams talks Hrishikesh Hirway through the process from demo to production – a great episode. ↩︎
2. Just last week, I found this little clip on Vimeo from behind-the-scenes at our wedding – everyone goofing around during the signing of the register whilst the wedding guests were all listening to our lovely friends singing in the church. ↩︎
3. This counts as a Sinatra reference, so I get to shoehorn in a mention of my favourite Sinatra-related piece of pop culture ever: John Mayer, on David Letterman, covering In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning. ↩︎
4. My brothers-in-law made up our wedding band, along with the wonderful pre-Ferna Ferna, and the mythical, amazing Rick on trumpet. They absolutely smashed Paolo Nutini’s Pencil Full of Lead out of the park. ↩︎

This week was heading in a different direction; but the news on Thursday of the passing of the actor James Van Der Beek weirdly resonated. One of those actors whom millennials weirdly probably saw a huge bunch of his body of work: Varsity Blues, The Rules of Attraction, in later years Apartment 23, and of course, Dawson’s Creek.

Dawson’s Creek sits in a weird emotional space: I have seen less than half of it, yet the character of Dawson Leery resonated so definitively (Film school? Check. Spielberg obsession? Check. Inability to articulate actual feelings in any healthy way? Check check.) As a piece of television, it sits in a bracket that I wouldn’t knowingly let my own kids watch; but for this teenagers in the late 90, the actual characterisation, stylised as it was, tickled that love of smaltzy American comedy drama deeply.¹

(I actually have a Spotify playlist called Joey, Through the Window.)²

Of course, a key element of these shows was always the soundtrack. I studied with someone who ended up being a music supervisor for TV later in life – talk about your dream job. And I realise now, skimming the Wikipedia pages for the Dawson’s Creek soundtrack albums, that this allows me to tangentially jump right into the great forgotten musical genre that kids today just don’t get – the homemade mix tape (or in our generation, CD).

I had a friend in school who was an enthusiastic purveyor of mix CDs – and they were dominated by this same sub-genre of 90s/00s American adult/contemporary/soft rock music. His compilations became a primary source of a whole host of tracks – not music that would ever bother the UK Top 40, but music that was nonetheless often familiar from TV, movies, and music television. A prime example – all of Five for Fighting’s America Town, but particularly the lead single Superman.³

The SFX of the music video have not dated well – but this is prime, ‘As heard on…’ music; no-one cares about the video.⁴ Moreover, John Ondrasik provided teenage me with ample ammunition for tiny subgenre of piano-led soft rock which, as a pianist first and foremost, was always welcome.⁵ I remember playing covers of this all over the place in my late teens.

Those mix CDs supplied all sorts of introductions – Dave Matthews Band, Goo Goo Dolls, Barenaked Ladies, Joan Osbourne, Avril Lavigne… basically a huge block of the contents of my Last.fm for the late 2000s. Perhaps we’ll unpack a few more here as the weeks go on.

1. We’re going to come back to this, but for me this is an arc typified by the content of T4 on Sunday afternoons – your OC, your One Tree Hill – but also widens to include everything that I watched on Channel 4 in summer terms when we were on revision leave – Ed (that’ll be mentioned again), E.R., weirdly Without a Trace purely in terms of scheduling. Was Joan of Arcadia in that bracket too? The other big time block was RTÉ2 (then Network 2) on Monday nights, with a prime comedy slot including Scrubs, That 70s Show, Friends – so much incidental music. This emotional arc probably runs well into adulthood and at least as our last big box set start-finish watch, Friday Night Lights, a decade after everyone else. ↩︎
2. The only feature-length screenplay I ever completed (outside of undergraduate work) was partly inspired by a moment in an episode of Dawson’s Creek. True story. Though it was otherwise mainly inspired by my attempt to profess my undying love for someone… via email. I found it on an old hard drive last year (the screenplay, not the email), re-read the first few pages, and died inside all over again. ↩︎
3. Superman is on Vol.2 of Songs from Dawson’s Creek, along with Teenage Dirtbag: there’s an epochal life story involving that song coming much later in the year. ↩︎
4. Wikipedia says it was featured In a key sequence on Smallville. Yep, that fits. ↩︎
5. I know people love it – I do too – but you can only play A Thousand Miles so many times. Though you should watch Vanessa Carlton’s ‘The Story of…’ minidoc for Vice – a rough ride. ↩︎

Sometime, maybe around 2009, I was sitting awkwardly at a low-key concert (some kind of coffee bar style thing), when a musician friend, Andrew, ambled over.¹ He’d been in the States for a year with his bandmate Steven,² and had come back with a bunch of war stories which I enjoyed hearing. And he mentioned that Steven’s brother-in-law was this up-and-coming singer-songwriter who, in Andrew’s opinion, was the real deal.

A while later, I remember driving to work on a Sunday morning with the iPod hooked up to the car stereo, and a song I didn’t know came on from some freebie sampler collection (remember those?). And I sat in the car until the song had finished, and played it again. And again on the way home. I found the CD sampler, which had embedded video files (again, remember those?), so stuck it in the computer. And when I watched the video – there was a glimpse of Andrew, bouncing around in his blue T-shirt in the background – and I realised, ‘Oh: this is the guy?’

‘The guy’ was John Mark McMillan; the song, ‘How He Loves’; and in my opinion, the rulebook for contemporary praise and worship, such as it was, had been torn up forever.

In my lifetime, contemporary praise – aka What We Sing At All The Things – had rapidly evolved from Graham Kendrick and friends, through to the rock orientated – but less geared for corporate singing – more acceptable end of American CCM music. I enjoyed seeing both Third Day and particularly David Crowder Band in that period; but even at by the early 2000s, the emergence of the behemoth Hillsong Music was shifting things up to a level of slickness that would lead to a backlash.

John Mark McMillan is not contemporary Christian music by any stretch – rather, like the Switchfoots of this world, a musician who writes about what matters to him, and what matters to him are often big questions about faith. But his talent is in mining a vocabulary that puts into the air words that sound real – not the limited range of the corporate Christian machine, but like the best poetry, words that paint a portrait of a heart and mind processing life in the presence of an infinite king.

The hunger of such music drew a line, however indirectly, to the explosion in stuff like Housefires a decade later³ – which of course, then led to the machine taking a turn, like so much of our culture, to more ‘authentic’ sounds in praise and worship. But throughout his body of work,⁴ McMillan has continued to innovate and find words to express meaning for his journey, and it is always heartening to me to go back and hear a range of songs that sound like a man crying out, in praise, exploration, or grief⁵ – or, like life, very often a mixture of all these things – and very many other voices joining in.

1. Andrew’s got a good back catalogue, both as a band leader and a solo artist, but a personal favourite is this soaring performance with the Ulster Orchestra, reworking a track from his eponymous album. ↩︎
2. The genius multi-instrumentalist, Mr Stephen Williams, of Sons of Caliber, Jude Moses, and of course – John Mark McMillan. ↩︎
3. These days, this kind of ↩︎
4. Let’s pick a few: Death in Reverse (2018); Borderland (2014); and Death in His Grave (2010) are three great tracks from three great albums, but there are many more. ↩︎
5. How He Loves has a significant back story, stemming from a tragic accident, and leading to a difficult third verse which McMillan rarely performed live as the years went on. But the story, as he tells it in this song story video, is beautiful. ↩︎