Newsletter 101

This is the 101st edition of my newsletter, and I’m changing everything. I’m changing where it lives. I’m changing how it looks. I’m changing my whole approach to putting my music, and my thoughts, out in the world. And, by golly, it’s actually fun again.

Okay, to be fair, at the moment it looks pretty much the same as it always did, but it now lives on my website rather than on the Mailchimp email newsletter platform.

I’ll explain the reasons for the move in a bit, but it’s part of a shift in focus for me that I’m really excited by.

I’ve rediscovered why personal websites are amazing, and generally undervalued and underappreciated. After years of lock-in on social media platforms, I’m really struck by how much you can do with them.

Now, I have left this website to collect dust and mildew for a number of years, and despite my frantic updating in the last few days, I’m sure lots of it is still broken – sorry! But I feel like I actually have a vision for how it should work in future.

In fact, this month I’ve got a bit carried away and maybe done a bit too much on this in too short space of time, so I feel like it might be even more chaotic than usual, but here’s what we have:

A whole new separate section for the dark political stuff, so it’s a lot easier to avoid for anyone who isn’t feeling it. And also, some light relief I made last year.

In terms of recommendations, it’s mainly folk or folk-adjacent music – some new, some old. But there’s also a couple of oddball recommendation choices in there too.

And there’s also a lot about how to do creative projects online. Within a hostile and increasingly toxic walled-garden internet.

Basically, I think we make our own little spaces of refuge.

And this is mine.

Featured

MICROSONGS

One fun by-product of overhauling this website is I’ve been trawling through all the stuff I’ve made over the years. This batch of microsongs is actually probably the most recent.

Some of them are literally just a few seconds long, but each one cuts right to the very quick of the human condition.

Be prepared to go on a pyscho-philosophical journey.

Bring snacks.

Featured

THE QUIET PART LOUD

Something I’ve written about before is that there is this tension being an artist in, or even just adjacent to, authoritarianism. Either you make your art about what the regime is doing, in which case they kind of win, or you ignore it, in which case you are tacitly treating it as normal, in which case you are tacitly endorsing it, in which case they win.

I feel like it’s difficult to have something to say, however small your audience, if you’re not addressing the rampaging elephant in the room. But it can’t be the only thing you have to say. As we say now: joy is resistance.

So I want to pull all my thoughts on the current state of world politics into a regular, but separate, article which readers can dip into if they’re interested, but which they can just avoid if they want to.

This is the Quiet Part Loud.

Recommended

PANTO HORSE SONG

Sometimes, it can just be as simple as clicking on a video by a musician you’ve never heard of because the title suggests it’s about a pantomime horse.

A sweet and (deliberately) silly song. Highly recommended.

Recommended

MAVIN GAYE’S CLUELESS ASS

This might be the first time that I’ve recommended a meme.

But I saw this screenshot on Bluesky, and it keeps making me smile. (No disrespect to one of the greats of Motown.)

It’s odd to suggest that a Spotify playlist could have perfect comic timing, but it does.

Recommended

CLAUDE CODE

I appear to be recommending an AI tool from one of the big AI companies.

But there has been so much talk about Claude Code that I feel like it’s worth identifying the cultural influence it’s having.

Software developers are saying that this has already changed the way they make a code forever.

Although, it’s probably worth adding a cautious caveat that I’ve also heard: making code is now incredibly cheap, but making software is still expensive. Edge cases, server maintenance, bandwidth costs, etc.

But still, it seems pretty incredible.

Recommended

THE MUSIC WE LOST

I mentioned that I’m trying to parcel off all the more distressing stuff into a separate article.

This is, in its way, a pretty distressing video, detailing the Irish famine of the 1840s and how it has affected Irish music, culture and life ever since.

It was recommended on the local folk Discord server, and if you are a folk nerd, I highly recommend checking it out.

Recommended

KYNTRA

Another recommendation from the Bad Tradition Discord server. This time of a folk duo – one of whom I was in The Reverenzas with a million years ago.

I haven’t seen young Henry Webster in a long time, as he lives in that London now. Although, rumour has it he’s been to local sessions and I’ve just missed him.

But he was a great fiddle player then and he’s a great fiddle player now. The guitar playing is pretty great too.

Recommended

BJÖRK SINGS THE ANCHOR SONG (IN ICELANDIC)

I still believe that Björk doesn’t get the recognition she deserves, as being perhaps Europe’s singular musical genius of the 1990s.

Despite her playful genre-hopping, I still associate her with the electronic, synthetic, modernistic.

But in this video, she just rides up to a local Icelandic church on her bicycle and plays the last song on her first debut album, singing in Icelandic.

It’s a whole different side to her, and it feels to me like a ray of sun on a heavily overcast day.

Here are the lyrics:

I live by the ocean / And during the night / I dive into it / Down to the bottom / Underneath all currents / And drop my anchor / This is where I’m staying / This is my home

A couple of years ago I was so happy that I had finally found the ideal creative channel for making music the way I wanted to make it: YouTube. I would record music, and make music videos, and then document the process of making them and comment on any interesting tangents along the way. The videos were way too long and unfocused, but I don’t regret making them like that. It gave me the room to experiment, and find a new format that I could refine over time.

Then… yeah. Trump. Again.

His return sent panic through the jobs market, making it suddenly much more difficult to get the boring safe jobs in University admin that I’ve been relying on for the last couple of decades. But it also gave us Vichy Tech, and the realisation that these unimaginably wealthy and powerful platforms like YouTube would soon be weaponised against us.

Now, I just shared the video below in the Quiet Part Loud, but I’m sharing it again here to expand on a different point.

It seemed clear that the internet of the big social platforms, which had become an increasingly toxic place anyway, was about to become actively hostile. Real life community was likely to become increasingly important, but so were smaller, more private online communities. Places where connections and relationships weren’t filtered through political gatekeepers.

Figuring out how this might work was a challenge for my music projects. But it was maybe a bigger problem for my day job.

Because I had been getting exasperated with working in university admin – perhaps unsurprising after 20 years, on and off. And I started to explore the idea of freelancing: specifically, using my day job background in communications and marketing to help Oxford researchers promote their research and their careers.

So I’ve spent the last few months doing just that: talking to researchers about how to communicate in 2026. From my many years working at Oxford I’d developed some pretty firm ideas about what works and what doesn’t. Ideas that tend to differ quite considerably from what the University tends to consider as best practice (and what I tend to consider is at least 10 years out of date).

As I’ve been pitching my theories, however, about the dangers of dependence on platforms that might be politically weaponised, and about the challenges of posting online regularly when you have hardly any time, and about the challenges of staying in touch with your followers when Zuckerberg wants you to pay for that privilege… I started to realise that I was also talking to myself.

I started to see the parallels between university researchers and purveyors of super-niche historical music.

Maybe the monthly email newsletter, which I had really just kept going for fun all these years (10 years this March, incidentally!), was actually the one thing to focus on. Or rather, maybe it was the combination of an email – which goes out to your audience rather than waiting for them to come to you – and a personal website, where you put whatever kind of content you want.

I suppose I was considering this for a while, but wasn’t really sure whether to commit to it.

And then one day I was idly thinking about what it was I wanted from making music. I knew – I’d always known – how to build a career as a musician: you move to London, play a lot of gigs, pay attention to the audience and adjust your material until they love it. Then you get a manager and it all builds from there. I knew that, but I didn’t want to do it. That’s the same way to build and grow a YouTube channel, incidentally, but again I didn’t want to do it.

Why not? Because for me the whole point of these projects was to realise the music in my head, not tailor it for an audience.

Then I realised: these last few years I’ve been trying to be a semi-professional musician or a YouTuber, but I’ve been doing it wrong because what I want is to be neither of those things. I want to be an artist – that’s the technical term for someone who isn’t interested in ‘market fit’.

And here’s the thing about being an artist: the whole point is to avoid formulas and quick workflows, and to come up with something totally new and original. That takes time. That takes a ton of time. And it will basically never leave time for marketing, or promotion.

You just can’t do both.

But the one thing that artists can do, so long as they’re happy with a small audience, is just make the best art they can, and put it out in the world whenever and however they can, and hope that word of mouth spreads. If it doesn’t, the art probably isn’t good enough yet.

That was the thing that clicked for me, and made me realise that platforms like YouTube and Bandcamp might be where I host my stuff, but I really need to focus on the email/website combo rather than appeasing an algorithm.

Oh, and I actually need to make some art!

I mean… that’s the other big problem. I don’t think I’ve made anything I would consider art in many years. I haven’t had time, because I’ve been foolishly been trying to get the marketing funnel set up first. Maybe that’s why the writer’s block as lasted so long – I just hadn’t been giving myself the opportunity to practice?

Anyway, I feel like I know what I’m doing now.

But I have a lot of catching up to do.

I moved the email newsletter to the website so that I wouldn’t be dependent on any online platform.

But I also did it because it lets me do this:

I’m addicted to workahol

Urgh. Another year end. They feel like they’re going so fast now. And sorry, I know I’m always whining about them as they end. In my defence, aren’t they just a precision-crafted ritual for worrying about where your life is, and isn’t, going? Unless you had a great year, in which case I’m glad someone is, and I genuinely hope next year is even better for you. But I think for a lot of people this one has been particularly suboptimal.

And in 2026 I have the joy of turning 50 years old. Something I am treating like PE class way back in school: decidedly un-fun, but there’s not much I can do about it.

A big part of this feeling is that I have had a pretty stressful 2025 – dominated by the constant threat of losing my job, and, you know, [gestures broadly] – and I feel like that’s made me not much fun to be around.

Anyway, now that I have a bit more bandwidth I’m trying to be more constructive and to strike the right balance between identifying problems ahead and focusing on joy now.

Part of that is going to be more of a focus on actually making music again (which I’m still in the very early stages of).

Part of it is also going to be about spending more time with friends, family and community, and that’s really what I want to focus on in this newsletter.

First, let’s do some recommending.

Recommended

MK.GEE

Mk.gee was big about a year ago, and as ever I’m late to the party. I feel like he’s writing the most creative and original pop/rock music I’ve heard since Hyperpop.

I first heard about him through Guitarist YouTube™ where guitar influencers were singing his praises for seemingly trying to make music they would hate!

It’s like he took a checklist of all the things good guitar tone is supposed to have, and he then deliberately did the opposite. Instead of a classic Fender Stratocaster plugged into a vintage valve vamp and recorded with perfect microphone placement, he plugs directly into a crappy old four track cassette recorder and then slathers on chorus and reverb.

And it sounds great. His singing is pretty impressive too. He reminds me, oddly, of a sort of neo-soul Steve Vai.

And I think this video is beautifully hypnotic.

Recommended

ANORA

If I was a bit more disciplined then I’m sure I’d be recommending the new Knives Out movie I mentioned last month (which I haven’t had time to see yet). Instead, I’m recommending an Oscar-winning movie from last year.

Actually, full disclosure: Anora is a movie I have started but not finished, and I am watching in 15 min chunks, when parenthood allows. (Less easy to do that with a whodunnit.)

So far, it feels like it’s part screwball comedy, part doomed romance, part Ken Loach drama, and part melancholy coming of age story.

I eventually realised I had watched a million billion YouTube video essays on how great director Sean Baker is, and I figured I should check out what the fuss is about. Particularly as this, his latest film, won the Cannes Film Festival Palme D’Or and won Oscars for best director and best lead actress.

He makes the kinds of films which I would make if I was a director and, you know, had magical powers. He treads that incredibly gossamer-thin line between making (a) realistic stories about people with tough lives (with lots of creative input from those communities) and (b) warm-hearted films that don’t make you want to jump off a building.

Recommended

DREW GOODEN TAKES ON THE TECH BROS

One of the early stars of Vine who migrated to YouTube, Drew Gooden has been doing talking-head comedy monologues since around 2017.

But this video recently set the Internet all a-chatter.

Suddenly he’s taking on political economics, and the graphs are coming out. And finance experts on YouTube have been going… “that’s actually quite a good analysis!”

Why does this matter?

Well, for all that mainstream news and entertainment is getting flattened and enshittified, I’m seeing more and more beloved quirky creators with huge audiences loudly and meticulously taking on the plutocrats. And this is important, because – being influencers – they influence a lot of people.

The Wealth Inequality debate seems to be seeping more and more into everyday discourse.

Recommended

BLUMINECK

This is Dave: an archer, pole dancer, medieval weapons fanatic and YouTuber who also goes by the name of Blumineck.

Just when you thought YouTube was an endless sea of monotonous repetitive podcasts.

I just think it’s so refreshing to see someone who seems to be a genuinely nice chap and who is not only having a lot of fun but is showing off some serious skills.

At the beginning of this Q&A video, he throws an apple into the air and then shoots it with a bow and arrow before it hits the ground. And he does it so casually.

He also talks about how he became a pole dancer, and gives a very thoughtful and considered answer to the question of why he isn’t on Only Fans.

Oh, and… er… it really does seem like everyone but everyone is talking about Wealth Inequality.

Recommended

DR HOPE vs GOOGLE AI

The aptly-named Ed Hope is a junior doctor who found internet fame with his pandemic dispatches from the trenches. He was appointment viewing for me during that time, although the algorithm has hidden his videos from me of late.

This video is, unfortunately, another case of how AI is ruining our lives.

Because he recently discovered that whenever anyone googles his name, the new Google AI overview will confidently tell you that he, Dr Hope, has been struck off for medical malpractice.

This absolutely isn’t true, and a quick follow-up search will reveal that the AI is confusing him with someone else. But most people don’t click that far.

Moral of the story: Google Search is terrible now.

Recommended

NOELLE PERDUE on 404 MEDIA

This is a great conversation between the increasingly ubiquitous (in a good way) 404 Media and online pornography historian Noelle Perdue, that covers a lot of ground and goes to all sorts of interesting places.

They start by bonding over their mutual love of ‘parody porn’. Game of Bones, Bill & Ted’s Sexcellent Adventure, Ten Inch Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Loin King… you get the idea. “There is a real art to it, because you want [the title] to be recognisable, and it has to be as stupid as possible.”

They move on to how the anti-porn laws are creating a culture of online censorship, deliberately or otherwise.

Then Perdue has some really surprising things to say about erotic chatbots: she was very early to write about them, and initially she thought they sounded like a great idea. Somewhere for people to explore without the possibility of real world damage. Now she thinks the opposite, and believes the lack of reality is extremely dangerous.

And that might sound obvious, but it’s worth hearing her explanation of it.

Recommended

SANTA GEORGIA by NANCY KERR

I expected to start a bit of a flame war on the local folk music Discord server when I suggested that Nancy Kerr is the best songwriter in the English folk tradition.

Slightly disappointed that everyone then went ahead and agreed with me.

Anyway, this song of hers has been my earworm for the last couple of weeks (well, this and the dastardly Wiggles, obviously). It’s about how she found leaving the narrowboat she had lived on for 12 years and moving to inner city Sheffield.

It’s catchy as hell, imho.

“So farewell cold winter, we will all shine out together…”

So the employment situation I’ve been complaining about all year has stabilised a bit. And I’m starting to get a bit of free time back.

I’m inching back into writing music again, although – as I mentioned in last month’s newsletter – I continue to deal with the problem that my ambition has vastly outrun my abilities, and there is still a lot of catching up to do.

But something else I’ve been able to focus on, which feels long overdue, is hanging out with friends again.

The last time I was focusing on this was actually the month before Trump was re-elected. I wrote a newsletter about how you need to ‘find your people’ and maintain those relationships, and then that got swallowed by the doomscroll for the next year and change. But now it’s back in my foreground, at least.

In fact, it keeps being in my foreground and then being pushed out by world events. I realised my social circle was shrinking dramatically just before the pandemic hit. And at some point I journaled an idea that has haunted me ever since and I think I’ve mentioned here several times before: ‘if you come out of a global pandemic being too busy for your friends them you’ve learned nothing.’

However, I realise now that I learned this lesson a long time ago. It’s just harder than it seems.

Of course it’s difficult to spend time with friends when you have two young children, but when I think back to before I was a parent, I found it difficult then too. I even found it difficult back when I was single.

Or perhaps difficult is not the right word.

What I used to understand but had forgotten is that having a social life is not about making a decision in the moment. For me at least, it requires long-term planning. If I wait until I am in the mood to see friends and family, it will never happen. And I’ll go into detail why not in a moment. But it’s never something I’m going to spontaneously do.

If, however, I plan my whole routine and schedule more carefully, and actually mark out regular social time, then I will want to do it when the time comes. Not least because I will be frequently reminded why it’s important.

To a certain extent, yes, scheduling a social life is more difficult when you’re a parent, because your daily life just has more moving parts. But, again, it’s not like it was ever straightforward for me, and this month I have been reminded that it’s totally normal to have to cancel and postpone from time to time.

Doing some kind of communal activity like music can really help, though. Way back in the ‘find your people’ month before Trump I was considering starting some sort of band again. Or maybe even a folk club.

Now, I feel like I would need a bit more employment stability to fully engage with that in this moment, but it does feel more plausible than it has in a while.

So What Have We Learnt?

Why am I unlikely spontaneously choose to hang out with friends?

Well, this relates to the title of this month’s newsletter. (My brother always used to make the joke: “yes, you are addicted to workahol.”)

For a long time I think I’ve been ambivalent about self-identifying as a workaholic, because in my mind this is somebody who is always pulling all-nighters and hovering around burnout. And I’ve always been pretty careful to make sure I lead a balanced life.

But I realise that, by a slightly different but equally valid definition, I absolutely am a workaholic.

Because whenever I get any free time, all I want to do is work.

Given the choice, this ‘work’ will be composing music, but it could be many things: journaling my thoughts, scheduling my tasks, doing various household chores or even noting down some wild project idea that I know I’ll never get the time to do.

Perhaps it’s that introvert/extrovert thing: some people get their energy from socialising, but I very much get my energy from focusing on making something in a solitary way.

And I really don’t think that’s a decision: I think that’s just how my brain is wired.

But I realised that this is the reason why without a concerted effort my social life withers away.

But realising this month that my workoholism has always been a kind of social barrier feels like quite a big deal to me. I feel I can now see why it’s a problem I keep bumping up against.