Category: May 2026

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. ↩︎

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. ↩︎

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. ↩︎

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. ↩︎

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.

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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. ↩︎