I remember my musical hero Lou Barlow (of Sebadoh) saying in an interview once that the only song of his own that he liked was the one he had just written. Songs before that, he suggested, felt like failed attempts to get to this new thing. Reading that, I always felt pity for him. Why couldn’t he see what I knew: That many of his past songs were profoundly impactful? 

But now I see that I have often fallen into the same trap, dismissing older songs as so weak as to be embarrassing. So today (14/11/2022) I’ve posted a new 6 track EP, called “Live at the Sloan Machinery Lofts” — an attempt to counter my inclination to shame.

“Live from the Sloan Machinery Lofts” is doubly old. It’s a set of recordings I made in my home almost 15 years ago, over the summer in of 2008. Further, these recordings were themselves a collection of songs that had been written over the previous decade. That means that the oldest track, called “Reward”, is just under a quarter of a century old.

And if they were just as good, or better, than my more recent work, I suppose I would feel like I’d learnt nothing in the intervening decades. That said, I won’t feel embarrassed by these songs. My younger self deserves some acceptance. And listening back, as dispassionately as possible, there are things that can make me happy to hear in them, in terms of the recording, the performance, and the song-writing that makes up this EP.

The recording process was bare. I decided to limit myself to three complete takes of each track, then add no effects and make no edits to whichever of them I chose to go with. I remember finding this a pretty anxiety-inducing process, feeling the weight of any error. 

And of course mistakes did happen – bum notes, vox pitches missed, timing issues, etc., etc. But when I do hit a note with the full impact I was intending, it’s all the more satisfying. I tried to joke, in the use of the word “Live” in the EP’s title, that no-one was there to listen, but now I have become that imagined audience, willing to move past blemishes, to hear what the singer has to say.

And what was that? These songs were written many years before The Impulse Powers appeared. They don’t have the demands of that project, to pull glimmers of hope out of painful experience. It is true that there is a lot of pain here: pain of loss, pain of relationships ending, and of the fear of failure. 

But it now feels like I can see a steady trend towards what would become The Impulse Powers goals and ambitions, even this far back. In 2012 I thought I had planned to completely reinvent myself, but that was an overreach. This EP demonstrates that it’s always been me, struggling with ups and downs, and pushing more or less effectively towards the former, across the decades.

The last thing publishing this EP allows me to hear is in the quiet around the songs. I wanted to record this EP in 2008 because I was living in a loft space, with 14-foot ceilings, and I knew I would probably never own such a great room to record in again. So I set myself up dead-centre in the middle of the space, and let the still air, and the reverb tail it gave me, soak into the songs.

I’ve actually left a few seconds of “silence” at the start and end of each track, to let in the hum of the HVAC, the buzz of our fridge, the sound of workmen drilling on the street outside, to have their role in each track. Each of them also brings me back to the place I lived in when my son was born, a place where Jill and I partied with our new-found community of friends, still close a decade on.