The Art of Longevity

Artists have a duty to claim that their most recent project is the best work they have ever done. But what if it’s true? I’m so taken with David Gray’s new album Dear Life (released January 2025) - and so too is David of course - that it seemed churlish to dwell too much on his earlier career success, no matter just how definitive that was.

“I’m always all in with the new stuff. If I wasn’t I would just retire. It’s always a moment of total commitment. I like the danger of writing and recording. There is gold in them there hills and you have got to go and find it”.

Dear Life is led by rhythmic singing and short-story style writing, underpinned by unusual song arrangements. But the songs catch on, almost every one a ‘grower’. It’s one of those records that is shot-through with reflection, philosophy, mortality. You could say it’s a mid-life record and there is nothing wrong with that, given how well it stands up to his classic breakthrough work White Ladder and his first decade of popular success.

“I feel like these songs are strong enough to go shoulder to shoulder with the big songs”.

His instincts this time around, are good. When David Gray takes to the stage on his extensive 2025 tour to play songs like Leave Taking, Fighting Talk and (recent single) Plus & Minus, he will not need to precursor them with an apology.

The understated quality of the past 10 years' work is a run of form that may have gone unnoticed by the music industry mainstream, but also suggests that Gray has been building to a head of steam. If this was 2004, he would be releasing Dear Life into the world as a surefire classic album. But here we are in 2024 - algorithm powered and neck deep in social clips. Releasing a magnificent record into the content void of today guarantees nothing. Especially when you are running your own small record label as Gray now is.

“You’ve got to go on a cookery show just to get the opportunity to play a song for two minutes.” 

White Ladder was one of those CDs everybody had. It came at the end of the CD era, one of the last albums that achieved cultural ubiquity. Lest we forget, the record was self-funded (on a budget of £5,000) and self-released. Inventing a sub-genre is one thing, and with White Ladder, David Gray did that - folktronica was the label the music press attached to it. But there was much more to it than that. In a sense, Gray pioneered bedroom pop, 20 years before it became huge on Spotify. Rex Orange County, Yellow Days, Alfie Templeman and a whole generation of others owe something to him. But his huge success with White Ladder will always leave him with something to prove. 

“The disaprovers are waiting every time you do something new. But I’m a very determined person. But then I love doing what I do. There is no trout farm for me. I just love doing this thing. And it’s getting richer and richer. There is always more to put into song”. 

He is literally making music for Dear Life. It shows. 

Support the show

Get more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/

My guest for this pilot episode is Gale Paridjanian of (the magnificent) Turin Brakes.

If you listen to the song Underdog (Save me) by Turin Brakes, it will tell you a lot about how Gale plays and what he brings to a song with his guitar playing. Gale is an underrated and understated guitar god - as all Turin Brakes fans know. Olly Knights, singer in Turin Brakes describes Gales playing as “the real deal since the very beginning", and also “band cheat code” which Gale & I explore further in this conversation.

Gale's choice of guitar is a Charvel electric-acoustic model from his days working in the acoustic department of one of the music shops in London’s famous Denmark Street, for which he paid something like £469 (roughly £1,200 in today’s money).

“It’s got my sound in it. If you plug it in it just sounds like The Optimist and that’s our sound. It’s a battle to play but there’s something about how it sounds when it’s recorded. It sounds like me”.

An inexpensive one-off model, in Gales hands, the Charvel became the signature sound for Turin Brakes - Gales says “it feels more honest the more acoustic we are” - and it’s true - the band were pioneers of the acoustic-led pop that followed, paving the way for singer-songwriters like Newton Faulkner, even Ed Sheeran. But Gale and the band are on fire, still. 

His own influences include The Stones, Chuck Berry, Chris Whitley and Derek Trucks. 

Gale plays some of his own and Turin Brakes fans’ favourite pieces - a lot from the band’s debut LP The Optimist - and tells stories of the band, his own life as a guitar player and the Charvel he holds dear, even if it is falling apart. Let’s hope he gets it serviced soon. 

Support the show

Get more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/

When I heard the Chilly Gonzales song Neoclassical Massacre, I immediately got in touch with his management and label to get Gonzo on the Art of Longevity. Not only are his views on AI and background music incisive, but Gonzo has some strong opinions about the music industry and the modern culture in which it operates.

The ever-evolving tension between creativity and commerce has been a career-long exploration for Gonzo. It makes him the perfect guest for The Art of Longevity. Indeed, his own career has been a perfect metaphorical rollercoaster of ups and downs. After a few years on the scene as an alternative/performance artist (which he very much is right now) he had surprise success with a quiet piano instrumental album Solo Piano (2004). Only to follow up with a full-on 70s influenced pop album, launching a brief and unspectacular phase as a major label pop artist.

“That first Solo Piano surprise success was a foundational moment in encouraging me to continue to take risks. When and if I wanna go back there it will be a very beautiful thing, so long as I am doing it for the right reasons, there is something fluffy and safe about it for me.”

As for the pop record Soft Power, it became his “misunderstood masterpiece”, demonstrating very nicely that you can always make failures part of your narrative after the fact.

“It became an opportunity for me to make it a retrospective part of my mythology - injecting a bit of drama to my career”.

Fluffy and safe isn’t a typical Chilly Gonzales career choice. Indeed, on the new self-titled album, he returns to his alternative origins, rapping on most tracks. And without doubt, he is a scholar of Rap - not only on a musical level, but on a cultural level. Rap seems more influential on his career than his impeccable classical training. No other musician I can think of blends the two in such an inimitable way. As such, on new album Gonzo, the songs come across as both avant garde and yet hugely entertaining at the same time.

“The best works of art will always function on a superficial level that brings you in - everybody is on the same page now - we are all trying to succeed by having a catchy song that can live on 20 second snippets on TikTok but artists who are doing it at the highest levels are still managing to sneak in a deeper artistic meaning or holding up a mirror to society. “Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan or Melanie Martinez…you can tell their goal is for their music to exist on both levels…that’s something that Rap gifted culture”.

It also gifted us Chilly Gonzales and for that we are eternally grateful. 

The full interview write-up is on https://www.songsommelier.com/

Support the show

Get more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/

In this day & age of abundance, you can easily forget what’s precious - like your favourite bands. If you are anything like me the question “what’s your favourite band” now has an official top 40. As in I have a rolling 40 favourite bands. Making a welcome return to the top 40 is Nada Surf, the ‘New York’ (now firmly remote) indie band that first hit my favourites list way back in 2005.

I always remember how I discovered a band, in the case of Nada Surf it was on a Mojo or Uncut free “covermount” CD (do they still do those?). The track “Do It Again” from The Weight Is A Gift Album (2005) has one of my all-time favourite basslines. Indeed, in our Art of Longevity chat, Matthew Caws and myself ended-up riffing on a playlist of pop songs in which the first thing you hear is the bass line. If playlists were still a thing, that would be a good one. It was a pleasant digression from the important matter of surviving the music industry.

Nada Surf is one of those bands that’s easy to forget about when music is so abundant and that would be a big mistake. Stumbling upon a new Nada Surf record every 4-5 years is a highly recommended balm for modern day life. I can’t think of many bands (or in the case of Matthew Caws, songwriters) who provide the soundtrack to fumbling through life in the way we sometimes do, especially if you recognise the traits of attention deficit, as Matthew does - the origin and subject of the band’s superb new song ‘In Front of Me Now’, which I have adopted as a theme tune for the time being. In my head, if you will, this song is a number #1 hit single.

Over the years, Matthew’s subject matter for Nada Surf’s songs covers life’s day to day tribulations, the mangled thought processes that cycle through our brains and how to see light from the dark patterns that surround us. We are essentially keeping Matthew company as his life has played out.

“Most of the time a song is just impressionistically how I’m feeling”. 

Nada Surf is one of those bands that made their way through a 30-year career and nine studio albums without disturbing the charts. Yet the band has never made a bad record and indeed Matthew, modest to a fault, is somewhat coerced into being proud of never making a dud album.

“It has felt great in terms of longevity for a very long time. Unbelievably when we were making The Proximity Effect (the sophomore album in 1998) most of the bands that we toured with had broken up and we were sticking together. That felt unusual”.

Whether new album Moon Mirror will change the trajectory for Nada Surf remains to be seen of course, although it’s unlikely. That’s just the modern music landscape in the streaming era. Perhaps what matters more, is that not only is the new album very much not a dud, but one of the best indie sets you are likely to hear in 2024. And that’s saying something, since guitars and indie bands are back in fashion, albeit the modern kind i.e. a new crop of cult bands. Let’s hope some of this new crop of indie guitar bands can stay the course the way Nada Surf has done. Turns out surfing on nothing can be a lasting pastime. 

Support the show

Get more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/

In Mark Oliver Everett’s autobiography “Things The Grandchildren Should Know”, the author, otherwise known as E, the frontman and band leader of Eels, wrote of Bob Dylan’s self-proclaimed destiny as a musician:

“I wish I had something like that, but I didn’t. At all. All I had was an aching sense of desperation. I didn’t have any idea what the hell I was doing and was only doing it out of not knowing what else to do”.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, E simply continued to keep on keeping on with music, leaving his home in Virginia to seek his ‘lack of destiny’ in Los Angeles. Low and behold, he wound up being signed to a major label - not once but twice - and at the second bite of the cherry, found significant and lasting success.

No wonder then, E suggests we rename this particular episode as “The Unconscious Art of Longevity”.

Some 23 years after signing his first solo record deal, E has found his way to a 15th Eels studio L.P., the aptly named Eels Time! Recorded in Los Feliz, Los Angeles and Dublin, Ireland, the album was made by the current line-up of E himself, Little Joe (Drums), Koool G Murder (bass) and The Chet (guitar), featuring Irish folk musician Sean Coleman and new collaborator Tyson Ritter (on five songs). Ritter is the lead vocalist, bassist, pianist, and songwriter of the rock band The All-American Rejects but is better known these days as an actor. In a twist typical of the Eels story however, Ritter - who on this occasion was connected to E by his manager - turned out to live close by. But The All-American Rejects shared the same label as Eels (Dreamworks) back in the early 90s. Almost two decades on, Ritter was finally reeled into Eels orbit.

It’s a microcosmic example of Eels' career story - a series of unplanned events driven by E’s whims - whatever he felt like doing at the time - a series of creative zigzag turns that often turned out for the best through luck or dare I suggest…a more similar destiny to Bobby Dylan’s than he once believed.

“I’ve been doing it so long now that everyone pretty much leaves me alone. I don’t tell the label I’ve made a record until after it's mastered and finished. I pay for the whole thing myself to have the freedom of nobody putting their two cents in”.

So in some ways yes, E’s career has been “The Unconscious Art of Longevity”. But look deeper and all the signs are there - the self-belief, single-mindedness and willingness to follow his own instincts and obsessions - these factors have underpinned Eels’ journey and kept the wheels connected to the rails. And each and every one of those 15 albums has a lot to offer

“It’s all a miracle to me that I still get to make music as my job. I’m lucky, but you have to get yourself in the best position to receive it when luck strikes”. 

Support the show

Get more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/

Marika Hackman's Big Sigh is everything a 4th album should be. Really good songs, good scheduling, sophisticated arrangements (brass and strings accompany many tracks). The album has variety - from the mysterious instrumental interludes of The Ground and The Lonely House (opening sides A and B of my/your bottle green vinyl copy) to stand out singles (Slime, No Caffeine) to epic album tracks (Hanging, The Yellow Mile). It has an impressive musicality and most of all, it has real depth. A truly great album is one you can climb into. Every listen reveals something new. Keep listening and your favourite songs will shuffle around changing places like a game of musical chairs. That’s Big Sigh.

A record such as this, in 2024, can reach a fleeting and lofty height of number 67 on the UK chart. So what’s wrong with the system here?

“Everything gets put on the little guy. Why has it become about artists and fans rather than labels driving the commerce? There should be a mutual respect between artist and fan, do they really want to see me on a selfie cam sending out a faceless message?”

But for an artist like Hackman, such frustration fights it out with gratitude on a daily basis. After all, she can make (expensive) records, get paid advances and take a full band on tour. Many ‘middle class’ artists operating in the same commercial layer as Marika cannot quite make it there.

What qualifies as the next level in this weird reality video game we call a career in music?

“It’s hard to break that ceiling to that next level - where it can run by itself - you need people to invest in you over the longer term, not just for one tour.  As artists we need to value ourselves more. We need to stop showing the industry that we are worthless. There can’t be an industry without us”. 

We need this to change. Because we deserve another four Marika Hackman albums, at least. Critically revered from her debut, the consensus (I read every review I can set eyes on) is that Hackman’s 4th studio album Big Sigh is her best work to date.

“Whenever I sit down to do a new record, it’s always about being better than the last one. To hear people say that my music has progressed to a new phase is like fuel to my fire. It’s lonely making records on your own, you can easily lose perspective”. 

As for the masterpiece, that is still to come. What happens after that is down to us. 

“I feel like I’ve got songs that are more classic that are yet to come. I used to dream about making a record that would transcend a generation, but now I just want to make a record that sounds like a classic record to me”. 

Support the show

Get more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/

Fran Healy and his band Travis have this longevity thing down. Firstly, you must have a love and addiction to music, as something magical. Secondly, that magic is for you to create - making music to nobody’s expectations but your own. But thirdly, you get lucky. As Fran says in episode 3, Season 9:

“The chances of a shit kicker from Glasgow going on to win the best band in the world is a billion to one. How can you be proud to be lucky?”

Well okay, but as all bands that ever got a break know, you have to be in it to win it. And for 35 years now, Fran has been in it - always mining for that song gold.

“Most songwriting is digging, until you find that nugget, and you extract it from the rock. You keep digging because you know you will find something”.

New song Gaslight is one such nugget - a fabulous pop-rock stomp, with a brass arrangement and burst of dirty guitar to boot. It feels confident. And, Travis has a new album - L.A. Times - written by Fran Healy from his studio on the edge of Skid Row, Los Angeles, where he has lived for 10 years. He describes L.A. Times as Travis’ “most personal album since The Man Who”. That album went 9X Platinum in the UK alone and shot the band into superstardom, and while no such expectations exist for L.A. Times, that’s just as it should be. The band that rose to fame during the peak CD era in the 90s is releasing their 10th album into a world where vinyl sells more than CDs, but streaming still rules. Does Travis have a place in this space?

It’s just not something that will concern Healy or his bandmates that much.

“The problem is when you think you are the shit, you are the diamond. But I’m still a lowly miner, and always will be. Joy and success you can define any way you want, but it’s about you, the person, not outside things”.

The writer of a song called Gaslight will never be gaslighted it seems. 

Support the show

Get more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/

After 25 years in the music business, both as a major label priority artist and as a jobbing musician, Ed Harcourt still has big ambitions. 

“My greatest achievement would be to write a song I would never get bored of singing”.

Cards on the table, Ed Harcourt’s two instrumental albums made between 2018 and 2020 (Beyond the End and Monochrome to Colour) got me through the pandemic. Well, they certainly helped. But Ed didn’t sing on either, so it comes as something of a relief to have Ed Harcourt back in the world of songs. Not only that, but his best batch of songs for a while - held together on a cracker of a new album El Magnifico. It is quite possibly the best album he has ever made. The question is, will enough people get to hear it?

Harcourt was first signed to Heavenly Records, which was subsumed into the EMI empire of old, where he was a priority UK artist for a while - thrust into the eye of the needle. But the chart positions never came, the pressure mounted, and, inevitably, Harcourt moved on into the second phase of his career as an independent artist. These days, his view of ‘the industry’ is understandably jaded.

“I went a bit mad. I had been institutionalised. I felt done. It still feels like a rollercoaster, but I can’t do anything else”.

His solo albums as an independent artist have impressed critics and fans - especially Furnaces (2016) - but commercial success has been elusive, and Furnaces left him burnt out and in need of a change (hence the ‘neo classical phase’ that followed).

Harcourt remains an active collaborator, however, producing albums for Kathryn Williams and Sophie Ellis Bexter, whom with Ed co-wrote on her last three albums. He is now working with emerging artist Roxanne De Bastion. In many ways, it is surprising he is not more in demand as a producer, although by his own admission, he will never be motivated to do anything within a million miles of what you might call a trend. Meanwhile, he tours with cult Ohio indie band The Afghan Whigs and is waiting for some film score projects to drop. But, for an ambitious artist, is that success?

“Success is working. Just making music all the time. I am proud but dismissive. Something will come, but I just don’t know what, yet…”

Harcourt now makes music with the battle scars of an artist who has been through the mangle. He rode the hype cycle - signing a five album deal to a major, experiencing the fallout from that, and steadily rebuilding to a place where he can always make music for himself.  

In particular on El Magnifico, there is a bouncy, upbeat ‘single’ in Strange Beauty, while Deathless is a throwback to the classic days of album songs - a centrepiece if you will. Broken Keys is reminiscent of Elvis Costello during his 70s heyday, while Into The Loving Arms Of Your Enemy may well be Harcourt’s best song so far. 

In fact, it might be the song Ed Harcourt never gets bored of singing. 

Support the show

Get more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/

Try playing a Crowded House record (any of them) then let Spotify play on…you will get just the best selection of really great songs. Go on, try it and you’ll see for yourself. This discovery may well make drivetime radio programming a heck of a lot easier, or possibly redundant altogether.

You may of course be a Crowded House fan and like, know this already. You may be a casual admirer, or even a sceptic. In which case, take the time to enjoy this shared revelation. But let me tell you that this is simple proof of Neil Finn’s songwriting skills. Certainly it’s more to do with that than mathematics.

I’m saying this as a recently converted fan. One of the deep pleasures (and deep privilege) of doing this podcast is that I can discover what I’ve missed, correct my own perceptions of some artists, and get up to fan-speed.

This band has made stone cold classic albums. Woodface, Together Alone, the debut album probably too. But each one of their seven studio L.Ps now including a brand new album Gravity Stairs offers a masterclass in high quality song and sound craft. Together Alone is a high point for sure but I particularly enjoyed the 2010 Intriguer album. Thing is, Crowded House records take time to love. They grow on you, something Neil Finn is well aware of:

"In general our records that may have been regarded as classic, have taken their time. Every album has been a slow boiler, requiring a lot of belief in it".

However, Gravity Stairs feels much more immediate than the band’s more subtle 2021 release Dreamers Are Waiting. Crowded House have cracked the code to a healthy longevity. Classic songs, great stagecraft, a relaxed attitude to ‘success’ and a continuous desire to create something new that’s actually good. Whether the new songs last as long as the old doesn’t matter too much when it’s the same writer, the same band that has made its mark indelibly. 

One thing is for sure, those songs will probably outlive the algorithms.

Support the show

Get more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/

When Real Estate's fifth album The Main Thing was released to fairly mixed results, was it time for a reset? In a sense, yes. For band leader Martin Courtney, it was time to get back to songs. After all, without songs, bands are just jamming, right? He set the bar high too, inspired mostly by the 1992 R.E.M. classic Automatic For The People.

Besides, you cannot call in a producer like Daniel Tashian without being able to play him songs of exceptionally high standard. For a start, Tashian produced Kacey Musgrave’s modern classic Gold Hour, as well as writing a bunch of understated classics with his own band The Silver Seas. 

Consider then, that the batch of songs landing on the new Real Estate album Daniel were so good that Tashian (who co-writes with many of the artists he produces) only tinkered with them. And in doing so, hopefully gave each one a liberal sprinkling of his magic song fairy dust. 

“In terms of his input into the songs it was minimal. Daniel was more like a cheerleader in the studio. He’s so fun - he’ll be jumping around and hype you up - so it’s much less daunting in the studio having him around. Graig Alvin mixed the record, and he’s also won Grammy’s too. We had high-powered people in the room”. 

Despite all this, Martin sounds surprised at the possibility of creating a classic album, although Daniel has the potential to be just that. What that means, in this day & age, is another thing entirely. Yet the band has been in classic album territory before, in 2014, with Atlas - songs from which brightened up daytime radio, found their way onto the biggest indie streaming playlists - and even landed that record on the Billboard top 40 and UK album charts. 

A decade on, with the music landscape much altered, the expectations for Daniel are less certain. In Courtney's own words “I know there is a good chance that it will come and go, like everything else these days”. But be assured that if you do become familiar with the record, it will pay you back dividends for a long time to come.

So where does a band like Real Estate fit into the modern music industry landscape? Still in the game and getting better, the band’s cultural caliber is steadily rising. 

Support the show

Get more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/