A question for you all.. I was listening through a playlist recently and a track came on from one of my favourite artists. Now.. The artist in question is irrelevant it could be any, but I found myself thinking.. Is this track actually that good? I mean, if you've been listening to this artist from pretty much day one or maybe heard a standalone track and loved it to the point that you go back and start from the beginning of their journey, you develop a knowledge of their sound and their particular lyrical style and it becomes personal.. So there's gonna be a time when a track is either played on the radio or heard through someone's playlist that’s taken from an album, if it's not someone you're familiar with.. A case in point.. If you take the Thomas Dolby 1982 album.. The Golden Age of Wireless.. Track 2, Europa and the pirate twins and then 10 years later the album Astronauts and Heretics.. Track 5, Eastern Bloc (Europa and the pirate twins pt 2) both excellent tracks in their own right and neither of them, the song or artist I've eluded to at the beginning of this article, however Eastern Bloc will make more sense if you know Europa and the pirate twins. I hope you see my point. Now here's the question.. Can you just drop into the middle of the musical conversation between an artist and their fanbase and start your personal journey with that artist from that point? Now unless it's a standalone single which is basically designed as a time travel portal taking you back to the beginning of the story, are you gonna understand? Because the song I heard made me think if someone with no knowledge of this band heard it, there's a pretty good chance that to them it'd sound fuckin awful and they'd probably never listen to another track by them. But as part of a body of work either as one piece of a concept album or just a general album track it could be telling part of a story spanning over years (Europa and Eastern Bloc) and to someone who hasn't heard this story from the beginning, they're not gonna have a clue as to what's going on.. Now I know for an absolute fact that I've been guilty of this very thing myself on more than one occasion and I know how hard it is to hear something that hurts your very soul but go back in and have another go at anything else they've done even just to clarify to yourself that they really are a steaming pile of shit and you didn't just insert yourself into a private conversation between old friends. Do we maybe need to stop butting in and think about starting up our own lines of communication? Who can say..

Until next time 😁