X M A S - Faye and The Scrooges (link)
This song has been described by someone I inflicted it upon as “a bit braindead”... but also so irrepressibly festive! Now, please, tell me how to spell Christmas! C-H-R-I-S-T-M-A-S! X-M-A-S!
Faye and The Scrooges are a somewhat informal affair. This is the only song I’m sending out this year that isn’t available on Spotify (this newsletter remains steadfastly mp3-based!). According to some decade-old sleuthing by a music blogger, the band is “a group of friends who get together and write/record a Christmas song with just enough time to give them to friends at the pub on Christmas eve”. Between 2011 and 2019, they released eight silly, excellent Christmas songs, and not another since. I don’t know why they stopped releasing songs; for all I know, they are still recording one each year, just keeping them off Soundcloud. But I rather like the idea of them doing the project for exactly as long as it was joyful, and then letting it be done.
Robin Sloan’s newsletter recently including some thoughts on finished work:
Finishing only means: the work remains after you relent, as you must, somehow, eventually. When you step off the treadmill. When you rest.
Finishing only means: the work is whole, comprehensible, enjoyable. Its invitation is persistent; permanent. Posterity is not guaranteed; it’s not even likely; but with a book, an album, a video game: at least you are TRYING.
Finished work remains, stubbornly, because it has edges to defend itself, and a solid, graspable premise with which to recruit its cult.
I was recruited into the cult (i.e., fandom) of Arcane, which finished in November. The first season was stunningly well-crafted, one of my favourite pieces of media in recent memory. The second (and last) season is still an incredible work of art, but the characterization was weaker, the plot more interrupted by shocking moments that didn’t cohere when further inspected. I wish I liked the second season as much as the first, but I’m also so glad they picked a release date, and finished it, and damn everyone’s expectations.
I worry that it’s possible to keep raising expectations (yours and everyone else’s) in a way that makes finishing projects almost impossible. I sometimes experience this on a very minute scale when sketching. If I start outlining each brick in a distant wall, then the other buildings I’m drawing need the same level of careful detail to cohere together, and I think why have I signed myself up for this tedium and sometimes abandon the drawing. On a larger scale, I see many projects stalled because they aren’t good enough to be finished; I think this problem is why we may never get another Song of Ice and Fire novel.
I don’t quite know the antidote to this, but I do think creating silly things for your friends pulls in the right direction. Joyfully inconsequential songs, and sketches, and stories.
Festively braindead,
- Tessa