Category: 40×40

Whilst about to begin a different anecdote about this song, a mild episode of PTSD has occurred – a flashback to a moment in the 2000s. Whilst still at school, a makeshift band were asked to perform a couple of songs at a fundraiser (a fashion show, no less, to which I inexplicably thought it would be a good idea to wear a cartoon t-shirt I had designed myself¹). I believe the two songs we performed were Ironic and this: an obscure album track by folk revivalist Ellis Paul, given prominence by its appearance over the end credits of Jim Carey’s slapstick Me, Myself & Irene. In my caffeine-fuelled flashback, the room was stonily silent throughout: not for the first or last time!

When I first heard this song, during a late night movie-binge at my cousins, during the summer break of 2001 or 2002, it was one of those things where you had to scroll through the credits and write it down, then play on repeat off the VHS or DVD itself.² Kids, in an era before streaming, it was probably then off to acquire it online from an (cough) alternative source, and then work out how to play it by ear.

We’ve previously mentioned how musical tastes supposedly skew towards your teenage years – and I think that largely holds up – but a caveat to my own is I think my tastes skew towards the things I was watching in my teenage years, which, with TV and movies in view, often means retrieving things from the late ’90s and earlier 2000s.³ The impact of such music was profound – alongside the love of film that I contracted over those summers, hanging out and making terrible short films, the two would combine and lead towards setting out to study Film and Music together at university a couple of years later.

Ellis Paul has a couple of other great tracks of note – Sweet Mistakes is a clever piece of writing, which also had fifteen minutes of fame on the soundtrack of another Farrelly Brothers’ film, Shallow Hal – but the innocent soul of this song, with a simple riff that even a clumsy teenager can handle, kept it a go-to song in my mind’s catalogue for many years.

1. Alright, here’s proof. ↩︎
2. Other imprinted tracks from this period: Aerials, Californication, and Frontier Psychiatrist. ↩︎
3. We’ve previously mentioned the golden era of official soundtracks. ↩︎

When Nickel Creek announced their indefinite hiatus in 2007, I was devastated; I had only discovered the summer prior, at the repeated urging of one committed summer team leader. It’s been a delight, then, not only on the occasions when they’ve reformed since, but on the wending journey through an extended universe taking in both solo efforts and a plethora of brilliant side projects¹ to follow this influential and un-pigeonholable group of musicians.

Picking a track feels almost like throwing a dart at a map, but I’ve plumped for 2005’s Helena – presented below in a pristine 2021 livestream.²

One of the reasons Helena is perhaps a favourite is a fond memory of musical friends (and at different points, bandmates) Erika and Josh performing a full-throated, never-to-be-repeated cover at some point in the late 2000s. To be fair, given the absurd musicality of Nickel Creek’s members, it is probably one of the few songs most of us mere mortals could even consider trying to imitate.

Chris Thile is the main reason I was delighted to be gifted a mandolin for my 30th; Sean Watkin’s 2020 collaboration with chamber musicians The Bee Eaters,This is Who We Are,³ was a key audible crutch during the pandemic. But more on the music of that surreal period in another post.

They are my favourite group which I haven’t seen live, even though I have had the chance; regrets, I’ve had a few.⁴

1. I mean, where do you start? Chris Thile’s Laysong sits somewhere between his solo singer-songwriter stuff, and his solo and collaborative renditions of Bach sonatas; then there’s Punch Brothers; the Goat Rodeo records; Watkins Family Hour (hands up for their cover of Not in Nottingham, from the best Disney movie that everyone forgets about); and the searing albums from I’m With Her. And that’s only some of their catalogue. ↩︎
2. The original album recording – with the unexpected, soaring appearance of a full drum kit at the denouement – is here. ↩︎
3. This one-off album is a sonic journey, but a sweeping cover of Paul Simon’s Graceland is a particular highlight. ↩︎
4. For the live aesthetic at work, what about this 2014 Tiny Desk Concert? ↩︎

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. ↩︎