PETE//HUEY

Category: 40×40

  • 40×40 // 01 – Gifts and Curses (2004)

    40×40 is a forty-week project, recapping forty tracks from the last forty years in no particular order to tell a few stories. The whole lot – plus many, many footnoted extras – are available on this Spotify Playlist (unless, like this week’s, they’re not!)

    So-called ‘lost media’ has been a bugbear for many, many years (and a reason I still, like a broken record, regularly cite Jeremy Keith’s 2011 talk All Our Yesterdays to anyone who will listen).1 I imagine the TV show Ed will crop up in a later entry in this series, a peak example of the medium – a show essentially kept off streaming because of the huge headache of transferring rights to a broadcast medium no-one envisioned when playlisting a whole host of great indie artists for the soundtrack.

    Stuck in such hell are a great many film soundtracks of the early digital era, amongst them 2004’s Spider-Man 2 – which contains a handful of great, unique tracks,2 foremost of which is Yellowcard’s Gifts and Curses.3

    Some say the music you are listening to in your later teens will be the music you carry through life: I was 18 when I got this OST CD, at peak pop-rock-transitioning-to-shoegaze, and Yellowcard were absolutely one of the bands regularly appearing on Kerrang! or MTV2 or whatever it was I was turning up and trying to play along with on the telly. But soundtrack albums are not where people’s best work end up: soundtrack albums are supposed to have a couple of big singles, and the rest is typically filler. There are exceptions, of course. But that this band chose to pour a significant amount of talent and creativity into a mid-track that, and this is crucial, really is actually based on and/or inspired by Spider-Man 2, is just fantastic. Production is razor-sharp; the mix is brilliant, with soaring violin; and the breakdown, though perhaps overindulgent, fits the product description as a soundtrack track. I believe it’s a fan favourite; and that, and only that, has saved it from the mists of time.

    Yellowcard had hits before and long after this,4 but I’m not sure it ever got better.

    1. Ironically, this series of films, which I had the privilege of directing and editing when working for Box42, almost became lost media themselves when they came off Vimeo a few years ago – at the time, the most well-known, When we Build by Wilson Miner, was at something like three million impressions – all gone. ↩︎
    2. I’m in big trouble with at least one other person on the planet for relegating Dashboard Confessional’s Vindicated to a footnote, but it appears on another record so it doesn’t count. ↩︎
    3. Sadly, I suspect the presence of a track from LostProphets means no-one’s campaigning for this compilation to be re-released. ↩︎
    4. The pick of the bunch is probably Ocean Avenue (with an incredible drum pop at 2:42), but as recently as late last year they put out You Broke Me Too, a great throwback featuring Avril Lavigne – which about twenty years ago would’ve definitely been worthy of blanket coverage on TRL or similar. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 00 – Pregap

    Without wanting to give too much away to the crawlers – 2026 brings a significant birthday. The kind of one where your doctor sees your date of birth, and swaps the checklist. There are probably blue nitrile gloves involved at some point.

    Some months ago, I was ruminating and reflecting on this, and came up with the idea of listing forty songs from my lifetime thus far: not the best songs, not the most significant, necessarily; but, as someone who has loved recorded music from an early age, songs that conjure up memories. And so, since then, I have compiled a list of songs – many, many more than forty – and am now trying to whittle it down.

    The (admittedly self-indulgent) concept will be to publish a brief note about one song a week, probably along with a few footnotes to allow me to direct your attention to other bits of ephemera (and frankly, squeeze in lots of other songs). Forty songs for forty years over forty weeks; no more, no less. There is no order, and little logic: just vibes, nostalgia, and an unhealthy bias towards ‘as featured in [US TV show]’ in the 2000s.1

    This preliminary article – the pregap,2 if you will – has no other purposes than, firstly, to explain this once, so I do not feel the need to repeat it; and secondly, to commit to the concept by throwing my cap over the wall.3

    1. Let’s just all take a moment to give thanks for Christa Miller’s work as the music supervisor on Scrubs. ↩︎
    2. The pregap is the bit on a CD before the first track, where occasionally artists would hide a track only accessible by ‘rewinding’ just the right amount from the start of track 1. My favourite: Damien Rice, 9 Crimes (demo). ↩︎
    3. A story that comes from Frank O’Connor, but best explained by Jed Bartlet. ↩︎