It’s pernicious, the way we think on memory. I like to make things up and insert them into the past. Some people call that fraud. I call it ‘writing’.

In 1997, a madman named Richard Ashcroft fronted a band called The Verve. I don’t think they are making music anymore. In the world today, there are approximately ten million people making music, or about 0.15% of the human population. I’m in the majority. I wish The Verve were still around, though.

Urban Hymns is their 1997 masterpiece. I use that word sparingly, but it is a complete, ethereal, profound album. The third album released by the band, and an absolute pinnacle. Everyone knows ‘Bittersweet Symphony’, but I would navigate to ‘Sonnet’ and especially ‘Velvet Morning’ as the best tracks on the album. Velvet Morning, in particular, says this:

“And now, I’m trying to tell you about my life

And my tongue is twisted, more dead than alive

And my feelings, they’ve always been betrayed

I was born a little damaged man, look what they made

I said, don’t you find that’s it’s lonely

The corridor you walk there alone

Life is a game, you’ve tried

Life is a game, you’re tired.”

Don’t you find that it’s lonely; have you tried; are you tired. What ails you? Or me, or us? I like sunrises, and am awake almost every morning during them, but I seldom watch. I’m not tired. You aren’t either, but maybe that’s how you feel at times. I urge a jolt of music. A dash of coffee, and then just laugh because you’re alive.

That same year of 1997, Radiohead released OK Computer. That title still hits me. Someone is consenting to a computer, as though that’s just the way it is, and now, seems to be the case. My favourite track on this other masterpiece (there, I used that word again) is ‘Let Down’:

“One day, I am gonna grow wings

A chemical reaction

Hysterical and useless

Hysterical and

Let down and hanging around

Crushed like a bug in the ground

Let down and hanging around”

When you write the words like that, it sounds like a downer, but listening to the song (highly recommended), it feels very uplifting. What kind of trick is that. Radiohead is mostly gone, although lead singer Thom Yorke (also a mad genius) is now making music with The Smile.

I’ve not been eminent in anything artistic; I barely the scratch the surface of the scientific world. I’m cognizant that the world is bigger than any of us, and that in some way, we are a collective that propagates itself over and over, towards an end that we have not yet figured out. Science is a set of blocks that fit together to build towards capability; art is a morass of feeling that escalates towards understanding. Sooner or later, these things have to converge. They’re not separate, in my mind. I often wonder if they have converged at discrete points already, and if those points might not be music. Surely, no scientist is going to argue with that melody that catches and turns inside you. And no artist will remain unmoved by the ether we catch at the corner of our eyes, or the tune that takes them to that place. We have our distractions, but art and science are the plume on the rising road.

We’re not tired. And 1997 was quite a year for music. And 0.15% of our collective humanity creates beautiful things, did you know that? I didn’t until this morning.