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  • 40×40 // 04 – I Don’t Know (2008)

    I don’t know (no pun intended) about an annus horribilis, but certainly the winter of 2008/09 was probably the lowest point of my adult life. Still, holed up with good friends in a little house off the Lisburn Road (a room for which I could not even afford the rent, and often relied on their charity) music was a refuge. The house had an odd-shaped back hall extension which I lived off, and we filled it with the drum kit and keyboards and amps and would fill it with a therapeutic wall of noise bouncing around off the entirely unsuitable tiled floor and plain boxy walls.1

    That dark winter season was also filled with discoveries, chief among the Bon Iver’s Blood Bank EP2 and Lisa Hannigan’s debut solo album Sea Sew.

    Hannigan was best known up to this point for being the best voice on Damien Rice’s heart-wringing O and 9 albums, and Sea Sew presented an entirely different tone and narrative – still very Irish and very handmade, but one dominated by an optimism that bubbled up and over. The first thing I saw/heard was the little live video above. Later, in 2009, we made the trip up to Derry to see The Frames for the umpteenth time at the Millennium Forum, and the support was Lisa and this full band – and the joyful noise was real and infectious.3 We were able to meet the band afterwards4 and they came across as a group of people in the best moment of any project – that feeling of the magic just taking hold as things come together, before anything happens to bring one back into the real world.

    Future albums deserve a listen as well, but the raw chemistry of Sea Sew, as illustrated above, makes it, for me, a warm memory in a sea of tumult.

    1. This was dominated by tracks from John Mayer’s Where the Light Is and Kings of Leon’s Because of the Times, and we will stood by those choices even when the neighbours begged for mercy. ↩︎
    2. A four-track wonder that sounds like being parked in a fogged up car in a frozen car park on a winter night, waiting for someone to turn up. ↩︎
    3. My uni classmate Will, who ran a great live music project called The Bandwidth Sessions for years, which Lisa recorded two tracks for. The whole channel remains a delight, and increasingly a time capsule of better days. ↩︎
    4. I went back and found a blog post I wrote at the time. No, my writing wasn’t any better then either. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 03 – The World Ain’t Slowin’ Down (1998)

    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. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 02 – Helena (2005)

    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? ↩︎

  • An Impression Upon the Mind

    ‘I have a memory like a … what do you call it? That thing in the kitchen you use to sift the stuff you want from the stuff you don’t. A sieve! That’s it. I have a memory like a sieve.’

    I appreciate this short article from Tim Challies, reflecting on the mixed bag of being a man of short memory – something I deeply identified with this morning, even as I tried to remember the name of someone I spoke to on Sunday past.

    One context he mentions is note-taking during sermons. I have a small library of Field Notes pocket notebooks stretching back many years at this point, which I carry most days and continually write down things. As I explained to someone over the weekend, sometimes it is for reference, but often I find it is primarily the act of writing something down which aids my own recall. (Hence, my weekly sermon notes very often also have a list of names scribbled at the bottom!)

    Analogously, I glance across at the second monitor where my Apple Notes app lies open. There, I have made notes – some short, some copious – on 506 books, chapters or articles over the last five terms of study at UTC. Last term, I began making notes on one book which it turned out I had already skim-read two years’ prior. At such times, I despair a little because it feels like I took so little in!

    However, Challies offers great comfort that it is the edification in the moment which has as great an impact on the heart and character, as any ability to recall:

    ‘[Jonathan] Edwards countered, ‘The main benefit that is obtained by preaching is by impression made upon the mind in the time of it, and not by the effect that arises afterwards by a remembrance of what was delivered.’”

    I’m convinced that what is true of sermons is true of life. And for that reason, I can rest assured that my satisfaction and sanctification are unaffected by my memory. I have been blessed, strengthened, edified, and encouraged, even when I don’t exactly remember how.’

    Read the full article here.

  • Paper Tiger

    Having (finally) forsaken micro-blogging in all its forms, it’s back to posting snippets such as this on a blog again. Nearly two decades ago, the artist now known as Good Swim played a set for me at a mini-festival hosted in our hayshed. Like everyone else involved, I still owe him.

    His new single, Paper Tiger, is out today. Already looking forward to the album when it comes. It’s on Spotify here, and Bandcamp below.

  • 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. ↩︎

  • Memory, Loss and Videotapes

    I was recently trying to dig out some video footage I’d edited about 14 years ago. As windows into the past go, it was a bit upsetting.

    Since hearing (and producing the film) of Jeremy Keith’s talk All Our Yesterdays in 2011, I’ve often referred back to it when contemplating the increasingly short lifespan of recent tech. Jeremy correctly predicted the huge danger in placing our cultural record into technologies and formats that have extremely short lifespans.

    Examples of this are everywhere. In the last seven days, Myspace admitted they’ve ‘lost’ all their song data prior to 2015: an estimated 50 million songs. (I’m particularly mourning four of them.)

    Last week, I got a message from my bank to say their app would cease to function on my five-year-old smartphone. I understand the legitimate programming decision here; but higher up the chain, the same bank have continually moved services from the branch around the corner to the app in my pocket, and now they want me to buy a new handset to facilitate their choices.

    The video I was hunting for had originally been filmed on 8mm camcorder tape; later, it was copied to VHS, then transcoded through a miniDV camcorder so it could be captured on a laptop for editing. (Stay with me.) In 2005, the laptop in question had about 4GB of storage, so when finished, I backed up the final edit and deleted the raw files. I even backed it up to two different formats to ensure its longevity.

    Because of course, now I had backed it up, it would be safe forever – right?

    My backup formats of choice were VHS and miniDV tapes.

    ///

    I read an article that made me groan this morning. The wizards of at Apple, as they have an increasingly bad habit of doing, will officially kill off 32-bit applications in the next OS X update.

    Why does this matter? A huge number of so-called legacy programmes will cease to function if you update – none more beloved than Quicktime 7. Though not updated in nine years, many people have held on to this old version of the app as it unlocks a wide array of old video formats (which, only a decade ago, didn’t seem so old.)

    So if you want to hold on to that professional archive, or old family videos, you’d either better get converting, or keep a 32-bit laptop around.

    ///

    There was a time when data archiving was the domain of people who pored over paper tape in basements. Yet today, all of us are forced to be archivists, simply because we produce so much digital product.

    Holding those old tapes – of films made with my high school friends – in my hand, I was looking down at these plastic things that represented hours and hours of work that represented days and days of production that represented years and years of friendship. Memories that I can only access via a patchwork of devices and cables.

    The very real prospect of a digital dark age as a culture is scary.

    But the very real prospect of a personal black hole is simply sad. If this is progress, I’m not sure how.

  • Twenty

    On August 16th, it will be twenty years since the death of my paternal Grandad. Now in my early 30s, I am three times the age I was then; but like these things tend to be, as a life event it is fairly etched in my mind.

    I remember what felt like days as scores of people came through the house to pay their respects. I remember begrudgingly playing exam pieces on the piano in the background. I remember my aunt getting disproportionately worked up when we ran out of doilies. I remember getting disproportionately worked up myself as we sang Thine Be The Glory at the funeral service. I remember my dad sagging and breaking down as he tried to thank everyone for coming in the hall afterwards. I remember clocking my cousin Johnny twice as we played cricket up the garden afterwards.

    He probably had it coming.

    But mostly, I remember the immensely sad sensation that this alternately quiet, stern, generous, mischievous, no-nonsense, rumpled man was now hidden forever beneath some freshly-dug Tyrone earth.

    These days, with the benefit of hindsight, I can see the effect he had generally in shaping my own character. We recently got to know an older couple who knew my grandparents very well, and they have frequently enjoyed reminding me of my resemblance to him, in both positive and not-so-positive ways!

    As the eldest grandchild, I feel guilty that I perhaps knew this man more fully than my sister or cousins, although I know for certain that he would not and did not play favourites. For most of them, he may be a more distant figure, and I find that a sad thought too because I have so many meaningful memories.

    I remember the smell of his shirts and his square spectacles. We were compadres in short sightedness; dad was similarly shortsighted, but insisted on contact lenses so to my mind had cheated the system.

    I remember cruising around in his Rover, running whatever errands were before us. His flat cap habitually lay across the back seat, and I hold it somewhat responsible for the line of caps I would have welded to my own heat until well into my teens.

    I remember kicking the football around in the top garden. Dad was too hard to play against; as I do now with my own boys, you want to remind them that you’re still better than them, and vainly convince yourself that this will always be the way of things! Grandad had no such hang ups. We would frequently stay at the house until Match of the Day came on at the weekends, despite the late hour; three generations of Man United fans trying to follow everything over the hubbub.

    I remember learning – and then being frequently thrashed – at draughts. Real men play draughts.

    I remember as he jokingly tried to teach the spelling of the Ulster-Scots word ‘pechin’. “P-e-double-ech-i-n…”

    That very specific sense of humour has lasted at least three generations as well.

    I remember his demonstration of the best place to pee around the back of the garage so as to avoid Granny’s stern glances out of the kitchen window.

    I remember the wonder of turning a fruit crate into a little treehouse.

    I remember thinking the large box that appeared in the living room was going to be a computer. I remember the disappointment when it turned out to be a globe.

    I love that globe.

    I remember the scrutiny of school reports, and the questions around what we had learnt today. That’s an interesting one, because at the time I felt he was the stern grandparent; in hindsight, I’ve realised that our granny was the true driving force behind our hereditary family quests for over-achievement; I think Grandad cared, but it was more about the character rather than the outcome.

    He detested laziness. He detested timewasting. He detested ’90s childrens’ cartoons and naff pop music.

    I remember tripping down to the front gate to nosy into the bread van. I remember the agony over which sweets to pick. I remember the joy as he later revealed the extra Fruit Pastilles stashed in the house anyway, and the orange hard candies to suck for an age.

    I remember seeing him the last time. I don’t remember the decline as the cancer aggressively took hold; I don’t remember much at all. But, through tears, I remember the sight of this now-small man, full of wires and tubes, reaching out and taking hold.

    I remember the impact as our parents sat around us in our kitchen, early in the morning, to tell us he was gone.

    I find it strange that even now I am so moved by the memory of someone that, in some senses, I barely knew. There are large swathes of his life I know nothing of. I devour the stories others are able to tell me, because like most of us, so much of what we know of our parents and grandparents is in the relationship and shared experiences, and that which predates those is largely lost upon us.

    Yet I know that so much of his legacy is in how he shaped his household, his children, his grandchildren. He is in my frame and my posture; my hands and my eyesight; my temper and my hunger for knowledge. I believe he’s in my faith and my principles as well. He’s in my father’s tone and my sister’s facial expressions, and so much of his memory is quietly preserved in the house which my granny still occupies, and the fierce love she has for all who regularly pass through it.

    I have not always followed his path, but I hope he would be satisfied with that which I have taken; the goal and the endpoint will ultimately be the same, and I look forward to joining him there. In the meantime, I know that if I can foster a relationship and character within my own children and grandchildren which emulates that which I gained from him, I will have made a good thing.

    I remember he made good things.

    Grandad, 1995

  • ‘The least-worst idea we had’

    Age of Empires finally came out in October 1997. Microsoft’s sales projection was 430,000 lifetime copies, miles beyond the team’s own expectations through most of the game’s development.

    “I remember saying to one of our employees, not too far before Age shipped, I think, ‘Well, if we ever sell a million of these things I’ll buy you a Ferrari,’” Tony laughed. “Because we were thinking if we could sell a hundred thousand we got ourselves a real business there.”

    – “The least-worst idea we had” – The creation of the Age of Empires empire

    Really enjoyed this oral history of the Age of Empires franchise. It’s nice when good things happen to people with good intentions.

    The sidebar about DirectX is an interesting footnote also; back around the turn of the century, it felt like there was a new version of DirectX every few months, necessary to install for each new game. We got our first home computer in the early 90s, but in 1997 the first ‘proper’ machine – running Windows 95 – turned up, with amazing titles like Age of Empires, Commandos, FIFA World Cup ’98 as part of the package. Simpler times.