One of the early ideas of this blog was soundtracks. Specifically, I was very interested in the idea of soundtracks made up of “regular” songs. I’ve been playing FIFA since ’98 which is where I first heard “Song 2” by Blur and I think that was where I started being introduced to new music (new to me at least) via video games. One of the major forces for this has been Grand Theft Auto. I played a lot of GTAIV and San Andreas and there are multiple cases of songs that stuck with me and it introduced me to lots of bands like Faith No More, The Gap Band and Juliette and the Licks.

Twin Shadow was the DJ for the GTA V radio station, Radio Mirror Park, and the soundtrack included the song “Old Love/ New Love” which I liked a lot. I pull the thread and listened to a lot of Twin Shadow at that time.

I’m working from home at the moment and it looks like I’ll be working from home for the foreseeable future. It feels like a return to the early 2010s for me. Working at home is mirroring my time studying for school and college exams and my musical tastes have gone in the same direction. Back then my setup was a giant iPod Classic with an aux lead into my Panasonic hi fi system. Today it’s Spotify on my phone, bluetoothed to the same sound system via some trickery.

The big album at the moment is Twin Shadow’s “Forget”. I definitely didn’t know about it when it came out in 2010, but I found it around 2014. It reminds me of the time of music blogs. I was very into the blog Sunset in the Rearview. I used to trawl through playlists and find things I liked and then deep dive on bands hoping to know about them before anyone I knew. And that’s exactly what Twin Shadow was making fun of as the dj on Radio Mirror Park, posers and hipsters and, even worse, people who were disgusted by posers and hipsters finding out about the things they liked.

I like this album a lot because it’s mostly stuff I can play on guitar and sing along to. When I first returned to it, it was a play straight through album. As I listened to it more, I found myself replaying songs. “At My Heels” was the first repeated, because it was the song that had brought me back to the album. Then, I began to repeat the two songs on either side of “At My Heels”; “Shooting Holes” and “Yellow Balloon”. After that it went back to just looping through the album again, but this time stopping during each song to look at lyrics and have a go on the guitar. It’s a great album to sing and play along to and I think that’s probably to do with Twin Shadow doing so much on his own. It’s a cool album and that’s a cool and inspiring idea, to just do what you need to do to get your music made. Obviously, it helps to be talented but inspiration is a start.