I will not write about the US presidential election.
This edition reflects on Trump’s win, my new album, and rediscovering music with a piano.
I sat down to write this week’s newsletter with the intention to discuss Trump’s victory. It’s the biggest news story all year and will materially affect the lives of most people reading this for years to come.
But you don’t want to hear about this from me (or anyone), I suspect. As I walked through the supermarket this lunchtime I passed the newspaper stand, which was filled with orange closeups of the new president-elect. I felt a sudden urge to give the finger to an inanimate object, frustrated that his victory had somehow followed me into “the real world” outside of screens.
There are some days at work when nothing gets done because of the news agenda. I remember the deaths of both David Bowie and Prince causing the downing of tools for most of those days while we talked about their legendary output and listened to their work. Trump’s first election victory was another day like this, but the novelty was still around then: what was this guy actually going to do in office? This time around, we already know.
So I don’t want to fill your inbox with more doomscrolling about how awful things are going to be. This sucks, it’s a terrible outcome even for the people who voted for him, and you already know all this. Instead I’ll leave the last word on this to my musical hero Ted Leo, who wrote an entire album about the awfulness of the Bush administration back in 2004 (god, how quaint and mild it now seems). The title track from that album, Shake The Sheets, runs thus:
I want to take it to the president
Him and all his cabinet with a broom
I want to sweep the Halls of Arrogance
Sweep the walls of the excrement of these baboons
But I respect and prize the covenant
I respect the process, I respect the rules
When will we find a chord as resonant
As to shake the sheets and make us move?"Roll out and make your mark
Pull on your boots and march
Then roll on and meet me where
You'll find me doing my own part"
Or as Leo himself posted just this evening on Bluesky:
“We’re still here, we still have to survive, we still have to work, and we still deserve so much, including music.”
In other news
I’m almost ready to release my new album – expect a future newsletter on this. This morning I took some photos for the album cover. It’s called Masks and I bought some classic theatre masks off eBay to use for the cover.
Last time around for my first album, I used an AI image tool to generate the album cover. This was because I didn’t have any visual art talent, I reasoned, and didn’t have any budget to pay for an illustrator. I wanted a picture of a buzzard (or similar) for the cover and knew that if I just typed some prompts into a free art tool, I’d get something usable in the end:
The image is fine enough, although I’m fairly sure the bird in the background is flying upside-down.
Later, though, I began to regret using this image. It was cheaper and easier for me to work with, sure, but I hadn’t made it. Every note of music on the album was recorded by me (okay, the drums were sampled, but come on) and I’d baulked at the idea of using AI to generate lyrics. Why was I okay with using it for the cover art? And how could I reconcile the theft of the work of various artists whose output was used to train the AI?
So this time around I’m trying to pretend I’m a photographer/visual artist. It’s not my specialism and I’m sure most serious musicians don’t shoot their own album covers on the paving slabs in their back garden using props they got off eBay. But I feel much happier that I’ve made this entire thing myself, warts and all.
This image isn’t the cover, but it’s where things started off. I already feel happier seeing it: I made it.
Mini-feels this week
The piano man
I bought a piano recently in an effort to force myself to take the instrument more seriously. I purchased a cheap 88-key MIDI controller a few years ago, which is basically a keyboard that doesn’t have any output – you have to plug it into a computer and speakers to hear anything.
My new electric piano is the real deal, with speakers(!) and proper weighted keys. I arrogantly assembled it on my own a couple of months ago after deciding the manual was wrong about it needing two people. Carrying the entire weight of its keyboard on my own and becoming uncomfortably aware that it was definitely better suited to being carried by a duo was a chastening moment – thankfully I didn’t drop it.
I make it a rule to play every evening while the kids are around, and my new favourite thing is finding songs from movies they know and bashing out the chords and singing them. This week we’ve started doing The Muppet Christmas Carol which is obviously the best Christmas film ever, and I’m falling in love with music all over again. Purchase of the year? It just may be.