This is a song to listen to on the way home from work. It's one for the flow of tired faces, reeds swaying in the wind, examining each one for the feelings that have been held in check the whole day long. It's a song for hard times, and for getting a little more honest with yourself about your life, and what it is and might be. For all this, and for the way her voice wavers, down and down, it's something beautiful.
This is from a new covers EP by The Holy Roman Army. As well as this song, it also features covers by Bon Iver and Peter Broderick. It's really good, and free to download.
Here we go! As always, there is some arbitrariness. The list is of 112 songs, but not for any particular reason. And it's not definitive, it's a list of songs I love the most: no more than one from each band, in order. They're all really, really good.
After the opening lines are cast here, the band suddenly decides not to wait, and sings, all at once, and all as one - a bird's song, a song of the north, of cold and community, and damn! but you wish you could sing with them. But even if you can't it's okay, because this chorus is there for you, and you remember how music is for you and your friends. This music is for special friends, ones who fight but still help each other, more like a family than a gang, tumbling along to rattling drums and a dark pushing accordion. This is a song sung by nightfall, and it's about what happens to people then.
I read somewhere that this song was written over one horrible week, while the singer waited on the results of an HIV test, and his doctor flew abroad on holiday. I'm not sure if it's true, but it sounds about right: this whole song is about worrying things better, wishing so badly for the good things in your honest little life not to be outweighed by anything else that you'll do anything.
108. Xiu Xiu - Muppet Face
There's an irrational feeling that overwhelms this song, an incongruous mix of emotions. Maybe it's the same kind of phenomenon that makes unhappy people sometimes look really, really good. Like being awkward and alone at a party, and happily putting away hard little drinks, seeing the room twist and blur in the strobe lighting, stumbling over the feet of strangers, heads turning. Nights like that, where your only real hope is of finding a corner to collapse in with someone else - someone equally as faulty in the way they work, and willing to admit it.
You can sing a song about your heartbreak, and make a point of not sounding heartbroken. That's something the Carrots seem to be expert at, and that's part of the reason I hold onto their songs as tightly as I do.
This song is warm and moving with a kind of nervous joy, the seconds spent waking up after a night where great things happened, when your mind rushes to remember everything again, as if you're catching up with your heart, beating heavily, getting ready for the next step.
There are days when you find yourself so wound up with happiness that everything you behold seems to be emblazoned with beauty, and seems to fulfill all promises made by life. This is a little like one of those days, spent somewhere normally grim and austere, like an apparition in a rundown housing estate.
101. Burial/Four Tet - Moth
This song is for dancing, but also for flowing drunkenly down a street, walking beneath the streetlights of East Berlin, looming like soldiers, spilling yellow onto the street, oil and light mixing by the footpath. You look ahead and see young men crouched by a wall, writing something indecipherable. You stumble on the cobbles, and notice the beat in this song, hidden in some basement club. You want to dance with someone, but you've been alone all night.
100. The Libertines - Don't Look Back Into The Sun
It's the intro that gets me here, the folk chord progression held up and banged like a drum, the fuzzy guitars that break in, and the earnest this-is-a-song-I-wrote vocals.
I don't think this band ever properly realised the potential hinted at in their finer moments, but damn, those moments were very very fine indeed. This song takes you and descends, going deeper and deeper until you're somewhere new, at the lapping edge of the sea underground.
Missing someone is the easiest way to feel the seconds of your life tick past, unused and unfulfilled, spent trying to find comfort in the doughy seats of a train, instead of in the sweet-skinned arms of the girl you love.
97. Bell x1 - Eve, The Apple Of My Eye
I have a weird relationship with this song, and this band. I can never properly decide how I feel about them. I find much of what they do uninspiring. I saw them live once, and immediately regretted it. And nevertheless, every now and again they get things so right that I immediately forget any previous disappointment. 'Eve' is like that. At first I loved it, then I grew tired of it. And then one night, one of those nights full of held hands and long gazes, we wandered past a busker singing the chorus, sad and sweet, and I don't think I'll change how I feel about this song again, after that.
96. Kings of Leon - King of the Rodeo
I don't really like this band, but I have to admit, when they get it right, and put a song together just so, it's undeniable.
Christmas lights all year round. Having fun in the dark. Your first drink since you stopped counting. I don't know what the song is really about, but any of the above will do for me.
This song always starts playing in my head whenever I'm in an airport. I think this is because airports make my head all funny. My mind moves onto some other level, and starts thinking thoughts that usually seem too heavy for it. It's the waiting, and being surrounded by people you're not talking too, inventing their pasts and futures, wondering who is leaving a loved one, and who is returning to someone else's arms. I sit back and think about how things have changed since I last wandered from country to country. I wonder what all the old incarnations of myself would be thinking, and I wonder what will be happening the next time I sit on the floor at the gate, watching people queue for a fixed-seating flight. And despite all this introspection, which usually does no favours for my mental state, I always enjoy the experience. The gap hours between flights, in a total limbo, as far out of your real life you can possibly get without fucking it up. It feels like pressing pause and saving, sometimes.
If those noises at the start are anything, they are bright colours which have come unstuck from whatever they covered, hanging now from tight guitar plucks, or whatever the hell that is that sounds so good. This whole song, the drums that are close enough to what you've heard before and yet unreal and unhinged enough to be a pure product of your mind. This song has ingredients, and side-effects, and they're wonderful. Synths that feel like floating, enough of a chorus to make this song epic though it really shouldn't be - listen!
Ohne zu ahnen, ohne lange nachzudenken - einfach hart, und gut so.
90. Bikini Atoll - Desolation Highway
The start is here is homely and simple, like watching someone paint a landscape, a nice way of filling up a great empty weekend. It grows from this into something unexpected, simultaneously like a friendship that blooms out of nothing, and the way you head out on a warm day and find yourself happy to see everyone, almost surprised they're there. You're reminded of how hard it is to ever be far away from people you don't know - even in your bedroom, or your kitchen, strangers are only a shout away. And here they are, and you all head into sunset together. When the song stops, three minutes in, it's something strange, as if the sun goes down - but immediately rises again, by popular demand, like God's encore. Everything everywhere continues, tinged in heavenly red, and everyone gets Utopian. I don't really know how people can create this much joy with only three or four chords, but I'm glad they can. (Also - that drum beat is fucking legendary.)
89. The Streets - Weak Become Heroes
This song is on the list because of one moment, when Mike Skinner, having built up the scene in details and glimpses for the whole song, breaks the illusion and acknowledges the looping piano as being the heart of the whole thing. It's like a conversion.
88. Ash - Shining Light
Ash and their effortless knack for singles is almost enough to make me want to stop listening to albums, and start worshipping at the altar of the chorus.
If you forget some of their other lyrical transgressions, and pretend you're a little tipsy, you'll remember what it was like when you first heard this song: all the insistence and forcefulness of the melody, the way it seemed kind of astonishing, in the original sense of the word.
This song brings something else to the party. Fuzzy feelings, and a strong desire to shake it, but not quite... That riff!
84. Gemma Hayes - Back of My Hand
I don't know if anyone else feels the same way about this song, but to me it sounds absolutely like driving through little Irish country roads late at night, eyes out the window, headlights bouncing across ditches and fields, little gated-off boreens. Slowly, streetlights emerge, then footpaths, then people, and then you're there, you're in town, you're in the city.
With this song in the background, you can imagine things you'd never really think up otherwise. Being stuck in a bathysphere with someone after a nuclear attack, steadily sinking to the sea bed, living off supplies for weeks until the worst of the fallout passes, and eventually realising that you're both in love, bittersweet and heavy. These are the places your mind goes when you listen to music like this. 81. Weezer - Island in the Sun
Hey, hey. I hope you don't mind if I go ahead and label this as maybe the best and easiest blueprint for pop musicians to follow.
If you want a song that seems to plant the band in front of you, stuttering away, stammering out their notes, a song that grabs you and swings you around like a child, this is it. If you want a band that sound like your best friends almost immediately, that's The WaronDrugs, and their album, Wagonwheel Blues, has been rushing through my head for some time now. It's full of songs like this that sound like you've been listening to them since you were little, that make you want to stamp and shout and dance and be an adult at the same time. It makes you want acting like a child to be taken seriously. It's a lot of fun.
79. Spokane -Proud Graduates
A long time ago I wrote about a song, and said life was made for two, a bed too big to keep warm by yourself. But this song, this one is what happens when it gets cold, and it's just some of the softest and saddest noise ever to be made with guitars, and violins, and two sets of throats with lumps in them, and everything is only barely touched and played and whispered for fear of disturbing the delicate loneliness that reigns over the whole thing, like a layer of dust.
Like wandering through golden rooms, filled with wonder, amazed by every little beat your heart takes, every little glistening detail, everything hidden underground, like some rich dead maniac's tomb. This might be the best thing this band ever does, and I don't think anyone could be disappointed if it was. 77. Kocani Orkestar - Siki Siki Baba
The language barrier shouldn't be a real problem in music, but it often is. It takes a little effort to get through to the Other, especially when the music is almost as foreign as the lyrics - but this song is so undeniable that by the time it ends you'll be converted.
Crash! Bang! This is ten minutes of fun packed into three.
75. JJ72 - Algeria
An Irish song, straightforward and powerful. There was a reason people expected great things from JJ72 - they could assemble perfect power pop songs packed with verve and feeling, and crown them with a chorus as frantic and glorious as the one here.
74. Modest Mouse - Float On
Overplayed, overrated, and ever so slightly unoriginal? Undoubtedly. But I bet you anything your head still bops when that dream drum beat kicks in, and I bet you still sing along at the end.
73. Animal Collective - My Girls
There is a moment here - 1.27 in - when the song starts up like someone has lit a fuse. After that it becomes something incredible, the sound of beautiful melodies battling in space, and even though that's paired with a simple declaration of a father's love for his family, it seems to fit perfectly. To the moon and back.
72. Mountain Goats - Get Lonely
How can a song that starts so easily, and with such a normal and familiar set of sounds, get so intensely sad? I feel bereaved just listening to it.
Well, this is a fine song. This is a song with guitars like scissors, drums like paper, and vocals like glue! Or like a big shiny cocktail with ice-cubes that you have to drink for a straw, and the ice is knocking of the glass in a weird rhythm while melting. And yes, the whole thing sounds a little drunk, but drunk with the weight of the world, and the joys of it, and possibly whiskey too.
70. Blur - Out of Time
I've never been a huge fan of Blur, but I do love how they manage to make a song so perfectly happy and sad at the same time. I can't imagine ever tiring of this one.
This is an amazing song - the lyrics depict a future Christmas, with bizarre gifts and creeping authoritarianism. The music adds to this, the eerie melodies, and the beautiful weightless sound of the kalimba (an African instrument like a xylophone played with the thumbs) producing a feeling akin to being locked out of your family home on Christmas Eve, and staring in the window. You'll love it.
68. Franz Ferdinand - Take Me Out
I still remember the first time I heard this, on the radio, on the bus. I remember buying the album, bringing it home and playing it to an emptying bottle of whiskey, and I remember reaching over as soon as this track was over, and putting it on repeat, just to hear that tempo change again. And again.
67. The Cay - Don't Go Out Tonight
My heart breaks to this song, and I can't understand why. There's no big moment, no emotional finale, no lyrics of loss. There's just a steady expression of joy at the little things, the little things that love makes so important and worthy: I just want to sleep for a while / till the morning comes when we will rise. That's all, and that's enough.
66. Stars - Ageless Beauty
This is the kind of song that would never marry you, so you'd have to elope.
Even aside from the compelling instrumentation here, my adoration for this piece of music boils down to the lyrics, describing perfectly the tragedy of a flooded town: One thousand people did what they could / They found the steeple and tore up the wood
Five hundred pieces means five hundred float / One thousand people means five hundred don't.
It's both astonishing and devastating in its subtlety.
64. Bell - Chunk
For solid weeks and weeks this song echoed around my head like a piano in a lonely locked room. It sounds and feels like looking out of a window over your cold city, and you can almost feel your fingers pressing the dark and white keys like they have some answer in them. The main melody here, that's the great bit. It's got a countless number of emotions tied in there, like someone starting to cry, and it could be joy or happiness. The last note sticks out, a thorn on a rose, a hand waving goodbye from a train - the f against the E major. It works on you, and I don't know what it does to you, but it makes me feel like the oldest 24-year old in the world.
This song isn't on any of Sunset Rubdown's albums. I had difficulty deciding between this and 'Stadiums and Shrines II', but this just took it in the end, by virtue of the tremendous push forward evident when those drums crash in, and the slight, and patient dismantling of the song at the end, while he's still singing it. It's worth hearing over and over and over.
62. Queens of the Stone Age - No One Knows
This is the product of a hot night's drinking, of that much I'm sure - though I'm not sure what kind of boiled-in-the-sun, distilled-by-a-madman whiskey you'd have to fill yourself with to come up with something this violent and fun.
If, like me, you've found yourself staring out your bedroom windows lately wondering how to make sense of such massive accumulations of snow, and such unrelenting cold, here's a song to help. This is what it would sound like if the snow talked back, and showed you all the fun to be had, finger-numbing cold or not. It's -17°C outside, but my friends tell me about the best hill for sledding, and where the best snow is to build big snowmen. That's what this song reminds me of: a little like if snow came with instructions for use. This is how music helps us make sense of new things that seem big and overbearing, snow, or love or other weird natural phenomena like that.
It's the ice that sparkles here, holding the vocals tightly, misting around them as they breathe, cracking a little with the warm tears that flow at the song's end.
59. Fionn Regan - Hunter's Map
This song sounds like Ireland to me, but I don't know what it sounds like to the rest of you. It's pretty spot on, except there are no cities.
58. My Morning Jacket - Lowdown
I don't think I'd ever get away with using the word 'lovedog' to describe the object of my affection, but the rest of this song is something I can subscribe to. The way the mournful background vocals paint a blooming new night sky over the daylight, it's like the sun is setting with a broken heart, going to sleep alone.
57. Andrew Bird - Fake Palindromes
Straight out of the wilderness, bounding into your front room, standing there beckoning you towards your own wild will - this is a song that means what it says, and what it says is this: if you feel like changing something, this right now is the moment.
56. Basement Jaxx - Romeo
You know when you've first been hit by the fireworks going off inside your chest for someone else, and you're walking home after the first night you both looked at each other like that, and there's a little festival going on inside you, with people dancing in the streets? Well, Basement Jaxx know exactly what that sounds like.
Well, no, I actually don't have any poetic reason for loving this song, but there's only so many times you can write about perfect pop, so instead I will direct you to 2.20 and let you describe it to yourself.
Deep down, I always think of the start of this song as a car crash, violent, rough, oddly compelling. Then those amazing drums kick in, and the whole scene rewinds, until we're sitting with someone at the wheel of their car, wondering what will happen next, waiting noiselessly for the serenity to give way to chaos.
53. Bright Eyes - The First Day Of My Life
Listen to this, turning a globe in your ends, dotting the places you've been: I was born here, here and here.
I've noticed I tend to be quite partial to anything that concerns itself thematically with the link between falling asleep and the cold. I'm not sure why, maybe some sort of Hibernian affinity for the idea of hibernation, or maybe because I'm lazy, or maybe because my family name actually means 'the sleepy'. Anyway, I'm a sucker for that kind of thing, and that kind of thing is exactly what Ben Shepard does here, and he does it brilliantly. This song sounds like it was dreamt up, written and recorded in the midnight hours before slumber overtakes us. It's like a bed I keep coming back to.
51. Feist - 1,2,3,4
One, two, three, and four, like my four children surrounding me, gazing with whatever smile it was that won me, their mother's smile, maybe, simple and homely, and mine.
50. Múm - Green Grass of Tunnel
I cannot listen to this song unless it's dark outside, unless I'm somewhere sleepy and warm, and I can properly appreciate the way the singer here, here voice sounds like a blanket.
This song tries so hard to be cold. Look at that title! Hear the piano being tapped at like water dripping from icicles. Still, the sun keeps everything bright, glazing off in the distance, melting snow, warming hearts.
48. The Knife - Heartbeats
This song speaks about one night, but it's the same one night that everyone finds themselves going out looking for, a night of closeness and shared breath and warmth and feeling that we want to seek out. This song gets it so right, it could almost be shorthand.
A song which seems, when you really turn your head and listen to it, to be put together like some kind of constellation, guitar lines and streaking synths laid out and drawn together against a sparse black background, soft and big and beautiful, and telling some simple story ...in which Todd goes out, gets moody, drunk and sick, but ends up with a girl whose name he kinda forgets. This is the kind of story that sounds much, much better in a song, and he knows it, so he gives the story guitars that are angry yet catchy, vocals that are gentle yet insistent, and a beat that just won't fucking quit.
This is the closing song to one of my favourite records of this year. It takes a melody first played in the album's first moments, and wraps itself up in it, making it bigger and bolder. It's like putting your little imprint on an apartment you've found somewhere when you move in, when you push your furniture at angles to the wall, when you've filled the kitchen with your food, when you've put up your posters and left your books on desks, when you've slept in your new bed until it's no longer new - and then the day comes when you leave. You pack up these things in boxes, tight and full and pressed down, like the feeling you get when you hold back tears. You pick up your clothes, and use the key a final time, and you undo all the things you did with such simple joy. You shut the door a last time, temporarily homeless. You bid farewell to a place you made part of you.
This song in particular is really something, just for the way that opening melody has the strange effect of both knocking you off your feet and raising you up. It's an incredible piece of songwriting, and as with most Bejar songs, there's nothing good enough I can say about it.
43. Outkast - Hey Ya!
Don't let the laughter here fool you - this song is beautifully put together, and it pulls you together when you need it, with a chorus like a surprise party.
I get up for work at ten minutes to six. Outside, the sun strains through what remains of the night, sleepy and hazy. It pushes on, dreamy and undecided, and slowly, as I move from one train to another, the cold morning becomes day, and I reach my desk.
On the way home, because I don't really get enough sleep, I've started finding it hard to stay awake on the train. I push through, trying to keep my eyes open, sleepy and hazy, dreamy and undecided. I often decide that I should go to sleep as soon as I get home, but it never happens.
This week, sitting on the train, I've been listening to a single Twin Sister radio session over and over. It's gorgeous, and perfect for that kind of sleepy setting. I'm of the opinion that this band has the potential to do amazing things, and I've yet to hear anything to convince me otherwise.
-- Unrelatedly, two things of importance:
One - if you're in Dublin, you might like to come see DM Stith, and Two - We're nominated for 'Best Music Blog' at the Irish Blog Awards this weekend. Fun times ahead!
In our sitting-room, actually. It's going to be fun. It's going to be cosy, and intimate, and really, really good. There will be candles, looping, and beautiful music. There will be wine and beer, and good company. Also, there'll be free buttons.
How often do you get the opportunity to see one of the most original and talented musicians of his generation play to a few lucky people in a little house by the sea? Not often enough, we say. So we want you to come along.
If this sounds like the kind of night you don't want to miss (and if you're reading this blog, it almost certainly is) just email me with the words 'DM Stith' in the subject title, and I'll get back to you with details. The house is in Monkstown, a minute's walk from a Dart stop, and fifteen minutes away from the city centre.
This list was tough. I'm not even sure it's finished. There's more than a hundred songs on it, and I'm not sure I've written about some of them properly yet. Many of these songs mean a great deal to me, and I don't want to get it wrong when I try and figure out why. The blog's fifth birthday seems like the right time to look back over the last ten years, from a numerically handy point of view. Also, it's kind of fun. It's going to take a couple of weeks, and many of you can probably guess the top five, but I hope you enjoy it as much as I've enjoyed writing and rewriting it.
Before I start the whole thing proper, here's a song from the top twenty that seems appropriate:
This blog is five years old today. That's kind of a long time. It went from being something I started as an excuse not to study (with a badly-chosen name, I might add) to the kind of thing I put on my CV. Along the way, I've been lucky, interviewingsomeofmyfavouritemusicians, getting them to reviewthings and writeaboutmusic, selling clothes and badges, getting great guestarticles, compiling those fun endofyearlists, and just doing generally fun things. This weekend, I was nominated for Best Music Blog at IBA10, and that's pretty cool. I feel pretty lucky that people read this blog, and keep coming back even when I don't find time for it. So thank you, dear readers. I hope you stick around, because I have no intention of quitting. In fact, I'm currently organising some of the most fun things I've ever done with this blog, and I can't wait to tell you about them. So stay tuned this week. And thanks for reading!
Sometimes, the experience of ending your working week feels a little weirder than normal. Fridays are like every other day, coffee breaks, emails and routine - but afternoon arrives, and all of a sudden you kind of fall out of it. Everyone else is laughing more than usual, and you're not sure what will happen - the night is beckoning you to come out and celebrate this temporary respite, a lull in the fighting, a ceasefire between you and work. This song is a little like that. It starts out regular and conventional, and it's not that there's a key change, or some weird time signature surprise, but it's more like the chorus gets there, and you realise you've been waiting for it for the whole song. It's finely made, like all ARMS songs, and it's part of a free EP which is very worthy of your attention, a little step on from 2008's excellent debut album. It's worth celebrating.
The demo for this has been floating around for a while, but it's astonishing how much of a progression the band has made with this song. It still sounds a little like wandering around a city while looking at the sky, but now that sky is full if images, of flickers of paper falling from above, not manna from heaven, but the revolution taking hold over skyscrapers. That kind of simple dream, the kind you trip into when you're tired, and then jerk awake from. That's the kind of dreamy that Twin Sister have put into this song.
This is the first single from their forthcoming EP, which is one of my most anticipated releases of the year. It will be a big deal, I tell you. They're also playing SXSW, should you be in the neighbourhood.
Beat Radio are back, and this time they've picked the sunset out of the sky and strung it onto this song. Golden light spills across guitar frets and kick drums, and everything is all set to get together, like the sunset is going to lead to a brighter day, instead of a deep dark night. There's something fine and astonishing about this kind of songwriting, when the light hits it just right.
This is the kind of thing I want bands to do more often. It's a really simple idea - the same song recorded and performed in a few dozen different ways, spliced together to make a video that serves as a shot of life on the road. It shows fans that the band earnest though they are about their music, needn't always take themselves too seriously. And it's another reason to love Efterklang.
Magic Chairs is out now, and it's great. Incidentally, for Dubliners, you can get Peter Broderick's beautiful album, Home, for less than a fiver in Tower Records. You might want to get on that.
Arcade Fire have just been announced as the headliners for Oxegen 2010. I might go. Yes, I'd rather they played Electric Picnic, and I think it's distinctly possible they might confirm more dates, but either way, things are going to get a little exciting. Remember how much fun the run up to Neon Bible was? There is joy ahead.
I want a day at the beach with you. I want walking with drinks in our hands, and sleeves pulled up, and being stuck together at night when the power is out. I want to be with you when we've missed the last train, and we're left wandering around in the cold. I want the look on your face when we realise we've paid more than is sensible for the wine at dinner. And right now, I want to listen to this song with you, because I think it's just about perfect enough.
--- Meanwhile: My review of the fine new Joanna Newsom record is up on State now. I'm happy with it. The National have announced details of their forthcoming album, High Violet. And should you not have been paying attention, you may not know that Arcade Fire are preparing to announce shows soon, including some secret "fun" shows that will be announced on the day. Prepare yourselves.
Any longtime reader will know that Cathy is just about my favourite Irish musician, and that her last record, Tales of Silversleeve, is one of my most-loved albums. It is with much rejoicing then, that I share with you the following news:
1 - The new album is to be titled The Nameless. 2 - It will be released on the second of May. 3 - There will be a single, 'Little Red' - this will be released on April 21st.
The album was recorded in Kildare, with Conor J O'Brien and others lending a hand. From what I've heard of it, it's truly beautiful. The demos that Cathy shared with us last year have flowered into something deep and sincere, and noticeably darker than Silversleeve, which had some dark moments of its own. There's some gorgeous string work courtesy of a guest quintet, and the album brings to mind a whole bunch of disparate influences, from the classical to modern songwriting, and oddly enough, France Gall's finest hour. That last one might be just me, though.
You can read an interview with Cathy here, and hear demos of some of the new material here.
Another reminder why 2010 is set to be a very exciting year for music indeed: Conor O'Brien's outfit have a full-length coming up on Domino Records, and this is the lead single. It's quite jaunty, and as with all Villagers songs, has a melody that you'll be humming long after your first listen. 'Becoming a Jackal' will be released on 7" vinyl on April 17th. Villagers are playing SXSW and the UK this month, with Irish dates set to be announced.
You might sing this song if you'd just moved into a house on a cliff, knowing that inevitably, it would one day fall into the sea. Or if you were involved in love with someone who couldn't stay. There's a kind of fatalism here, the kind of heavy resignation in which so many Irish towns are steeped, from the steady tidal pull of emigration that gets stronger as your children grow, or the small seaside towns where the sons disappear each day, coming back as little lights in the dark, or not coming back at all. You just have to live with it, and that's what people do.
Tony Fahey {email} is an Irish songwriter, currently recording material for a release.
