Fun nights in America with Coldplay.
“D-a-a-a-d, you’re not going to play this song AGAIN, are you,” my daughter shouted at me from her room, as Ravyn Lenae’s luscious Love is Blind started playing on my laptop.
As you can tell from the lack of a question mark, this was more of an order than a query.
I’ve been playing Lenae’s second album, Bird’s Eye, non-stop for the last month. Its creamy R&B melodies and futuristic flourishes have grabbed me like nothing else has in a long, long time, maybe not since Vampire Weekend's Modern Vampires of the City album way back in 2013.
I'm so happy I seem to have recaptured my music mojo, even if it's driving my family crazy.
I’ve loved music since my older sister played me Abba’s Dancing Queen in 1976. A year later I was enthralled by the spiteful exhilaration of the Sex Pistols’ Holidays in the Sun. 12 months on, Chic’s disco monster, La Freak, became the third divinity of my holy trinity of pop music. All subsequent loves sprung from one of these three songs.
My passion eventually led me to my first job in UK national newspapers, which involved interviewing bands. It was a deeply enjoyable - and very rock’n’roll - period of my life.
I spent time with REM in Los Angeles, hung out with Red Hot Chili Peppers in Tokyo, partied with Coldplay in Washington DC, was charmed by Foo Fighters in New York, and briefly became best buddies with Noel Gallagher of Oasis (we shared a love of Manchester City).
The wonderful Ravyn Lenae.
Things occasionally got crazy. Depeche Mode “kidnapped” me after a night drinking and singing Abba songs in a London pub, a female from a big-at-the-time Dutch pop group set fire to my hotel door in South Carolina, and four raucous, over-indulgent nights on a tour bus in America with the rock band, Jet, nearly killed me.
There were also moments of bliss. Spending two hours chatting with Björk about music and life was one of them - she’d long been a heroine of mine. Socializing backstage in Berlin with New Order, one of my favorite bands of all time, was also special.
However, the rock’n’roll lifestyle is exhausting, and not just physically. Long before I left the UK and its over-demanding newspapers, and moved to northern Sweden, new music hadn't been moving me - my passion had become my work, and that’s not always a good thing. I was burnt out.
Five-times-a-week gigs, endless aftershows, and transatlantic trips two or three times a month sounds like fun, but not when you're the wrong side of 40, and unable to resist it when a tipsy pop star shoves a bottle of Jack Daniels into your hand, and demands you "get it down your neck."
Björk, the genius
But moving to the calmer environs of Norrland gradually healed me. Additionally, after years of us trying to conceive in the UK, my girlfriend became pregnant with twins within three months of our move here.
The demands of parenthood, as well as a healthier work-life balance -- and a distinct paucity of opportunity! -- ensured there’s been no return to the rock’n’roll lifestyle, and slowly music has eased its way back into my life.
Indeed, so much do I love the Ravyn Lenae album that I actually felt the compulsion to write about it, something I've not felt for a decade or so.
My love of music is being rekindled.
Even if my kids don't always appreciate it.
This is a column and the views are the author's own.