Monthly Wrapped: What I'm listening to in...May

Another month, slipped away!

It’s hard to believe that we’re already into June: warm weather, sun-burn etc. It feels like just yesterday that the nights were long and summer felt a world away. Time flies!

Maybe that’s why this month I’ve struggled to keep on top of my musical ‘archive’. May’s wrapped playlist seems rather scant compared with my previous more beefy offerings. The better weather, resulting increased will to go outside, as well as wedding season getting well underway has meant that I’ve had less time to cultivate healthy listening habits.

Nonetheless, I have managed to produce 7 (seven) songs in this month’s playlist, which I gather for some is a lucky number. Perhaps it was really intentional then. It’ll also allow me to think a bit more deeply about each song in turn. Maybe it’ll even make for a more interesting post!

We kick off with an old favourite of mine, ‘Sweet Thing’ by The Waterboys. I’ve always found the song to be uniquely comforting — its 6/8 jig rhythm and lilting melody feels like the perfect simple antidote to overbearing complexity. A perfect song for troubled times. I don’t tend to play the song live, and I don’t think I’ve ever really tried. I’ve found that I have a real aversion to playing the songs that I really love. That’s a different subject for a different post, though!

There’s a bit of a jump between this song and the next on the playlist — Self Esteem’s ‘I Do This All the Time’— but the two do have similar energies. It’s a beautiful and emotionally complex picture of a young woman desperate to share hard-won life experience with an earlier self, or indeed a current listener. The song has been compared with ‘Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)’, the 1998 song produced by Baz Luhrmann, with text derived from Mary Schmich’s 1997 column ‘Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young.’. Truer words were perhaps spoken, but few.

Perhaps that's why I've always felt that the Luhrmann song threw away its greatest opportunity: a concept with real weight derailed by superficiality. While it is true that both songs feature similar subject matter, Self Esteem's track is far more interesting: lyrically and musically. Luhrmann’s song, while being a novel take on a clichéd subject, never travels much deeper than that novelty. ‘I Do This All the Time’, on the other hand, buries itself deeply into the core of the speaker’s psyche. You can hear every regret, every missed opportunity, and every future hope set against a dramatic, enveloping background of musical production. Vocally, Self Esteem is nothing but refreshing. Her style is authentic, technically detailed, and crucially raw: culminating in a fantastically compelling musical statement.

Next up is a real folk song, “Bold Nevison The Highwayman” by Jack Rutter. It’s an exquisite example of a modern English folk song that sounds like it could have been written in either 2026 or 1726. Jack Rutter is doing an admirable job attempting to modernise the folk genre, resisting the twee of some other examples of folk comebacks, like the god-awful (sorry, not sorry) ‘The Wellerman’. He sticks to the basic formula, while adding some terrific production (just listen to the bass-y swell at 1:14) to sharpen everything up. It’s got all of the bite and authenticity of a local trad session, with the aura of a chart-topper.

Rutter’s banger transitions seamlessly into a much older song by short-lived ‘70s folk band Fotheringay, ‘The Way I Feel’. It has very much the same approach to modernising older music styles, blending a very familiar folk song structure and harmonic basis with a very busy, marching rock rhythm section and a blues-driven lead guitar. It’s a study in light and shade: at once complex and bare. It is darkly foreboding and in a way, unsettling. Listening feels like reaching into a new dimension, apart from borders, structure: time itself. It is altogether a deeply lonely song. It feels like staring into the abyss, without it having eyes to stare back.

What could possibly bring us back from this? Well, fear not: Linda Ronstadt arises to the test with ‘Willin’. Over the last few years, I have become a deep admirer of her work. She has one of those voices that seems utterly timeless, and her music is well suited to almost any emotional state. No matter what you’re doing, or how you feel, she will be there to help you through. There’s not much more to say about the song than that. It’s flawless.

I’ve always been a second-order fan of Maisie Peters, and by that I mean my wife discovered her music [before she was famous] and I’ve listened along with her. She’s an interesting study in how artists shift in their musical and commercial approach to work. Starting out as making almost exclusively gentle, very intimate tracks and moving towards more commercially successful music. Inevitably, this meant her music got a tad blander, same-y, and I found her less interesting to listen to.

However, her most recent album ‘Florescence’ feels very much a return to form, and one of those songs feature as the penultimate in this month’s playlist. ‘If You Let Me’ is a reminder of why so many fell in love with Maisie’s voice in the first place. She has a naked vulnerability that you can really feel, unlike some of her peers, who merely adopt the affect of someone ruminating over their emotions. The song also features Marcus Mumford (of the obvious), who you wouldn’t have thought would compliment her, but the two find a unified voice in the song and it makes for a unique experience. You really feel like you’re getting something new with the pair, so I hold out a hope for future work from them.

If you only listen to one song this month…

Let it be ‘The Mauritian Badminton Doubles Champion 1973’ by Hamish Hawk. We have reached the end of this month’s playlist, and it is in the form of a song title that matches my seemingly unmatched over-verbosity. I’ve always been a sucker for tongue-in-cheek writing, and this song’s title is indicative of its delightfully purple approach to lyricism:

To write a cathedral,

I’ll need a ballpoint pen

It’ll sound like ‘Common People’

Sung by Christopher Wren

On an upright piano

With nice narrow keys

In a Glaswegian chapel

Or a Parisian library

And as I sit I watch you diving

Into a swimming pool that shines

Like a screen

And I call out “Isn’t this living?”

And you call back

“It’s living”

And you call back

“It’s living the dream”

The song manages to make a succinct point while sustaining some of the most outrageous imagery ever committed to contemporary music. They are lyrics to rival Warren Zevon’s most ambitious and haunting. Hawk’s song (and in fact, most of his music) seamlessly pairs dense, dark phraseology with the tone of a stadium anthem and the drama of a nuclear bomb. He is positively magnetic.

If you’re wondering, by the way: there was no Mauritian badminton doubles champion in 1973. I checked.

That’s all for May - see you again next month!

Finlay