Friday Rec | March 27th, 2024
One weekly recommendation on what to read, watch, listen to, or think about
For the next few weeks, I’m going to be trialing something a little different for Friday recommendations. Instead of the usual “roundup,” I’m going to focus in on one thing — one artist, song, book, film, or other bit of media that I think is just particularly wonderful. This will allow me to go just a little deeper, and hopefully help you get a little less “link overwhelm” trying to contend with 10-20 links and recommendations every issue.
This week, I want to focus in on an artist that’s become one of my all-time favorites, specifically the song that introduced me to his work ten years ago this month.
In early 2014, I was in the UK recording my album at a studio in the Surrey village of Camberley, about an hour southwest of London.
Each morning, I would get picked up by a studio assistant and driven from my short-term apartment to the studio. We would chat while the radio played softly in the background, driving through the beautiful English countryside to the studio, which was built on a lovely little isolated plot of land surrounded by apple trees.
One day during that morning ride, I stopped and asked the studio assistant to turn up the radio. This sort of odd voice was singing this sort of odd little hook — not words, but this repeated cooing sound. The style was something like folk, but with a much more global sound than the American folk music I was used to. It was such a unique combination of soothing and strange that it stuck with me, but we arrived at the studio before I heard the name of the song or artist.
Months later, back home in the U.S., I still couldn’t get the song out of my head. I went on an internet investigation trying to track down the song, typing in various spellings of “koo-koo loo-koo,” “cuckoo ruckoo,” etc.
Finally, I found it. I became an instant fan for life.
To put a button on this story, a full four years later I was living briefly in Seattle with my wife and our one-year-old son. I was working on my laptop from a cafe one day, listening to this song in my headphones, when I looked up and out the window I was facing. There, on the sidewalk directly outside the window, stood two men chatting.
“Wow,” I thought. “That guy on the right looks just like Nick Mulvey.”
As they crossed the street, I Googled “Nick Mulvey touring dates.”
Mulvey, a British artist who had almost never performed in the U.S. before, was playing just down the street from me that night. It was in fact him I had just seen.
As I as listening to his music.
I booked a ticket, not believing the coincidence.
But best part of this story, in my eyes, was the show itself:
It wasn’t great. I left early.
Such is life.
What have you been reading, watching, listening to, or doing? Let us all know in the comments!