Category: September 2026

It passed me by at the time, but a little earlier this year marked the twentieth anniversary of, theoretically, my first genuine studio experience – recording a four-track EP in a recording studio in deepest Co. Down.¹ I cannot remember the number of days involved (it wasn’t loads), but a few memories stand out: late nights, early mornings, generally being cold, great pieces of old music gadgetry being everywhere; and watching huge amounts of Futurama in between concert films, as we tagged in and out of the recording booths.

For whatever reason, Incubus: Alive at Red Rocks (2004) was on rotation, and the band’s musicology came under close scrutiny as we tried to figure out the sound we were attempting to produce. It clearly had little or no impact. The EP in question, Solitude, remains a source of some frustration, some 20 years on. For some reason, we convinced ourselves to mix it ‘flat’ – there’s little to no dynamic range in the mastered tracks. I think the idea was it allowed you to crank up the EQ settings on your ow sound system and play around. But I later recall an utterly deflating experience when visiting an acquaintance, an experienced radio DJ with his own basement studio, who ran the tracks through his desk and immediately made them come to life. “Why didn’t you just do that?” he said with some exasperation. Answer: I don’t know.

Unlike that experience, Incubus certainly make it slap. Drive is an incredibly satisfying little riff to play on guitar, and the production immediately sounds like the year it was released. I suppose Incubus more typically sit at the intersection of grunge and alt-rock for popular release, but this is all pop really – and pop it does.

This song is forever connected to that primary memory for me – but despite that, it more widely represents all those great bands that people were sharing around at college – Death Cab for Cutie, Wilco, Bright Eyes – that marked a person out as a Serious Muso, and not just a regular listener.²

1. I recently re-found a low-res set of clips I put together at the time. Images from another world, set to a terrible live recording we carried out for a sound test. ↩︎
2. Sitting with someone and listening to their CD copy of Transatlanticism from start to end… these are things you can only do when you’re 18 and studying a humanities degree. Let’s add Title and Registration to our 40×40 playlist. ↩︎

In my current place of work, I get a little kick from being able to print something at one end of the building, and then go and collect it from the other. You know, networks and stuff.

But it led me to reflect this lunchtime on another era. When I was an undergrad¹, both using the Web and printing anything required a journey across the street, and up four floors the computer lab on Elmwood Avenue. This led to numerous long afternoons half-heartedly tapping away at a workstation; but, part-way through first year, I developed an addiction to Yahoo! Music which became my coping mechanism, pumping music and videos into a little window in one corner of the screen as I was probably trying to write about cinema on the other.

Several favourite artists were discovered this way, but when Ben Folds’ album Songs for Silverman dropped in 2005, it quickly became a favourite.

Folds plays the piano. Hard. Not the rhythmic chords of modern praise and worship – full on melody. But hard. It falls into an interesting space, because it’s not the rock piano of either the T4-friendly US teen shows,² nor the symphonic madness of a band like Muse. Folds sounds just right alongside Regina Spektor.³ But also is not adverse to screaming. Or playing with Weird Al. It’s a particular niche.

This particular, nerdy piano player (me, not him) particularly appreciated Songs for Silverman, and especially the lead single. It’s perhaps a more melancholy and reflective record than most of what came out of Ben Folds Five. I learnt it off, and it became a little standard for my own practicing: if I could get the lines up to speed, I knew I was getting somewhere.

Listening back, 20 years later, it’s probably neither as sophisticated or ground-breaking a song as I thought when I was 19. Few things ever are. But that piano sound was one I carried with me for years, subconsciously emulating (or trying to emulate) in everything from alt rock to church settings. Some things remain warm in your memory because they represent an important memory or emotion. But some things just end up written into your bones.

1. I want to add, ‘the first time’, mostly as an acknowledgement of my wife’s cyclical suffering at the hands of my relationship with higher education. ↩︎
2. For a segment of the population in their 30s and early 40s, this is a meaningful definition. Gavin DeGraw singing I Don’t Want To Be. Phantom Planet’s California. Augustana and Boston or Stars and Boulevards. These are all songs that could be redeployed to impress people at open-mic sessions, because they would realise they knew them from their Sunday afternoons on the sofa. IYKYK. ↩︎
3. Their collaboration on Dear Theodosia is the best Hamilton Mix Tape cover, and I will die on that hill. I don’t know why there isn’t an entry on 40×40 for Regina Spektor: Samson is one of the most achingly beautiful and sad things ever committed to iPod; forever associated in my head with a New Year’s Eve party, and all my girlfriends cool-seeming friends. ↩︎