Quoted

Grief is about a communication of ideas and feelings,’ I wrote, ‘a dialogue suddenly stopping, becoming a monologue when you didn’t want it to.’ I said grief was the process of wanting to share more and be more with people who are no longer here, and I still believe that. Music gives us a path to them, and at the same time it appears to sit outside mortality, offering us songs which, when we want them to, appear frozen in time.

The Sound of Being Human by Jude Rogers

Watched: The Sparks Brothers on Netflix. The nearly two and a half hour running time just flew by. Some elements had me harking back to the fanciful elements of Martin Scorcese’s Dylan documentary but I loved the whole thing.

Sparks is a band that has flitted in and out of my consciousness for years. The latest album, “A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip”, got me through that horrible 2020 summer lockdown.

Read: https://www.hmv.com/music/marillion-interview-2022-pete-trewavas-an-hour-before-its-dark

“It’s the stuff that’s underneath that takes a bit more work, that’s what makes people fall in love with music. When something slowly dawns on you, sometimes years after hearing it for the first time, what the song really means, or what a song can mean. There’s a strength in that quality to being able to have more than one layer in your music and your lyrics, and we use that, I guess.”

Read The High Llamas :: Hawaii
Now 25 years old, Hawaii shines as the masterpiece of Sean O’Hagan’s avant-pop innovators, the High Llamas. Prior to finding a permanent home at Drag City, the group’s early catalog had largely languished over the years, following an unfortunate copyrights acquisition which equated to very lim...

I can’t believe Hawaii is twenty five years old now. The number of albums released by The High Llamas is pretty low but every one is a gem.