My Sunday confession: I remember when writing used to be a hobby. Have you ever had a hobby? 

This is the definition of ‘hobby’: an activity done regularly in one’s leisure time for pleasure. It’s also a small horse or pony. I think I’d take the pony. 

Well, it’s not a hobby for me anymore, and I encourage you to think about it as something more than that too. Don’t label it. Don’t give it a label. Just engage in your fancies and belt your shit across the keyboard or at the end of your pen, until you’re glorious.

This morning, I got up at five and made a pot of coffee. Ground the beans and then made the percolating stuff. Not my favorite. But I was seeking volume. Caffeine turns me on, I must admit it. Outside my window, there is a cherry tree, but they don’t look like cherries, they look like bright red berries. Before someone tells me that cherries are actually berries, I encourage you to relent. I’m no horticulturist. I’m no hobbyist. I just want a pony.

I wrote a story this morning to a bit of music, something I highly recommend but that is not for everyone. Write to music, edit to silence. Other will say: write drunk, edit sober. I like scotch and wine, what about you? But you don’t drink those things at five in the morning; rather, you go for caffeine, because caffeine – it turns you on. I won’t try to describe what I wrote this morning, other than that it’s about six thousand words and it’s been on my mind for a long time, something that really wanted to slip out, so I had to give it a go. I’m glad I did. I don’t know if it works. What’s it mean, that a piece of writing works? Does it go to its job every day, dig holes or design spreadsheets, then come home exhausted and drink a beer before watching television? Is that what we mean?

Anyway, here is the music that accompanied me on my journey this morning. Five songs, that’s all. They are still playing in my noise-cancelling headphones fed by my laptop computer. I love saying ‘laptop computer’. Somehow, ‘laptop’ is just not enough to describe the thing. Like me. I’m not just human, I’m a human being. And so are you. But stories, they are not human beings. They are products of the imagination, the speculation, the wandering soul, and prodigious amounts of caffeine drowning in an ocean of fabulous music. 

I’ve provided links in the below, because these songs are genuinely worth checking out. I would not steer you wrong, I promise.

The Ever Turning Wheel – The Soft Cavalry

These guys started up in 2019 or so. British. I guess you could call them shoegaze. Does it ever startle you how much great music exists in the world but that doesn’t get played on the radio? Why is that? I mean, these guys don’t even have a wiki page, and yet they come up with stuff like this. This song is spectacularly and shamelessly big, with a slow build up and these immense strings that connect and multiply over time, like we’re being swept away by a wall of heated air. I think of this song as cosmic. Don’t you want to be cosmic, sometimes?

If only I could dream up off these clouds

The ever turning wheel’s not slowing down

So call off the race

There’s only one way back to you

The only way to play this song is loud. Because if you do play it loud enough, someone might hear you, and isn’t that what we all want, at the end of the day? Or in the early morning, the caffeine in your veins because it’s just too early for scotch?

The Trapeze Swinger – Iron and Wine

I’d imagine most people know Iron and Wine, an American guy named Samuel Ervin Beam who writes folksy stuff that is, you know, sort of the opposite of cosmic. The Trapeze Swinger is nine and a half minutes long, and if that scares you, please understand that this is one of the few long songs ever written that deserves it. Once those voices sound off in the background, and with every repeated time Iron and Wine implores you to ‘please, remember me’, I get goosebumps. Like this guy has seen a reality that I have no concept of.

Please remember me as in a dream

We had as rug-burned babies

Among the fallen trees and fast asleep

Aside the lions and the ladies

Please, remember me. Isn’t that what writers secretly want? To be recalled for their words? Is he appealing to us? Telling us to get with it, and think beyond the hobby we inadvertently fell into, back when we dreamed of everything everywhere? I hear no lies in this. I only hear music.

I Can’t Get My Head Around You – Billie Marten

Billie Marten is British, under thirty as I write this, and has been issuing music since she was an early teenager. This song was released in 2023, you may or may not have heard it, but if you did, it’s not because it was on the radio (almost guaranteed). I love music that is shamelessly emotional. It’s the opposite of the pre-constructed, completely designed, utterly fake pop music that is all over the radio these days, as though a counterpoint to industrial music has risen up to combat the commercial urges of the music industry. When did music become an industry? Maybe always, but who cares when we have songs like this.

I have some fears, I’m born with ideas to run from the heat of someone

But I’ll never rest, and I won’t forget the taste of my morning sun

This is not a complicated song. It simple, it’s direct, it’s moving, and it’s just a perfect bit of music as that morning sun rises and utterly overwhelms you with gratitude for the opportunity to see it yet again. What are you going to do with your morning sun?

Enter One – Sol Seppy

Another British artist… what is happening here? Sol Seppy’s real name is Sophie Michalitsianos and she’s been making music since 2006. This song has been used in a couple of movies, to great effect, and you may have heard it as a result, but I urge you listen to it barren. Because this is a barren song with a plunking piano sound until strings start and a voice rises, proclaiming, sooner and more imploringly than we expect, ‘Insha’Allah, Insha’Allah’ (if God wills). What instrument do you think God plays? You can’t say all of them. You have to pick just one.

We move as one

Amazing grace is pouring down

Fear not this light

We are on this light divine

I don’t particularly find anything religious about this song, but it is ethereal, and somewhere out there, we are going to find answers. It may not be soon. It may not be us. But writing and creativity is a quest for the unknowable, insofar as we consider that in the here and now. We are divine. We are human. We are made of stars and music, and that’s about it.

Strange Pleasures – Still Corners

I save this one for last because it is the space-faring tune of all time, the one that plays in the ship that hurtles through the universe and slips between dimensions. Yes, this is dreampop. Yes, there is British content here, but also American, a band that has been around since 2007. They have an intense catalogue of shockingly dreamy tunes, none more than this one. I think this song is what you listen to as you touch the dirt of a new planet, as supernovas blow up, and as you climb to the end of everything and come face to face with our maker. Or you come face to face with yourself.

You drift along the desert sand

As deep as you in deeper nights

We don’t want to fall in love

You drift along the desert ice

Of course we want to fall in love! That’s why we do what we do. Do you string words together for some other reason? Are you a fighter? A truth-seeker? An astronaut? Either way, you’re floating in space. We’re all spacefaring, even though our feet are stuck in the ground, because our world is moving at an astronomical pace through astronomical space towards a location pre-supposed by this song and its dreampop sensibilities. Enjoy the ride. Write your soul out. Everything is going to be okay, and one day, in some moment, we are going to land this ship.