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.

This is my first music post of the new incarnation of this blog. It’s funny because the blog started as an exclusively music blog. Part of why things stopped with that was the blog’s niche disappeared. It was a time of illegal downloads, just before streaming sites took over. My goal was to to gather free music that people were putting out. It was mostly unsigned bands, covers, remixes and some swap your email address/ like a Facebook page/ retweet a link for a download jobbies. When it began, I had just seen Time is a Thief supporting Canterbury in the Academy in Dublin. I went home and looked up Time is a Thief and they had 2 free tracks on their social media. I downloaded them and listened to them a lot on my big iPod classic. From then, I saw them any time they played in Dublin. I went to see them support Billy Talent. I bought all the tshirts. To me, it seemed like that investment of posting 2 free tracks on social media paid off.

It was a weird time for music. Buying music was finished. CDs were still around but there wasn’t really any money in it. Money was from gigging and merch. I think we’re in another weird time for music right now. I had tickets for five gigs that have been cancelled or postponed due to the virus. For big bands there’s probably big losses, but these acts are in decent financial positions in the first place and also don’t take on a lot of the costs of gigging themselves or have insurance for these things. For smaller acts this has the potential to ruin people. There’s a whole load of ways that this will fuck up people’s lives. There’s self financed tours, refunding ticket sales, paying bands, techs and crews, transportation etc. But there’s also things like people who don’t renew their leases on their homes because they’re planning on being on tour for 3-6 months for example. Or getting merch made in bulk to sell on tour and then being stuck with a van load of tshirts and vinyl.

So my plan is to try and buy some merch. I was supposed to see Darwin Deez in May so I bought the 10 year anniversary re-release of his first album vinyl bundle. It’s a tshirt and a record that I like from an artist I care about. Things aren’t going to be back to normal for a long time and I care about the music that I listen to and the people that make it. This is how these people make a living and the financial model for how they do that has gone out the window so it’s important to support them in anyway that we can.

Here’s what I got: https://darwindeez.tmstor.es/cart/product.php?id=57613