My band Candidate had an album launch last weekend for our new record Point Clear. We’re really proud of this album – it’s definitely my favourite of our records, and the one that sounds most like we always wanted to sound. Before we played the LP off vinyl through Spiritland’s speakers - these twin monoliths the size of 1930s World’s Fair Robots – I grabbed the mic and said ‘a few words’ in the wedding style.
I was thinking I should say why we’d made a record at all. We had five LPs out before, and a good critical reputation, but hadn’t released anything since 2007. And even though we’d never fallen out, and we all still lived near one another, we’d not felt it was worth doing it all again.
And I remembered that we had only come back together to record because someone had died.
Adam Schlesinger, songwriter for Fountains of Wayne (and musical director for the TV comedy show Crazy Ex Girlfriend) died of COVID early in the pandemic. I’d been keeping sane by listening to his music, and watching the show he helped make, and then he was dead. We were all shocked, and so we decided we should quickly make one of those ‘playing together but not really playing together because that’s impossible’ lockdown videos, which we then put on YouTube, to pay tribute to someone whose music we loved, and whom we were shocked to have lost. We really enjoyed it. And then thought, ‘We should probably get back together, then.’ It was simple as that.
The song we’d chosen to cover was Fountains of Wayne’s ‘All Kinds Of Time’, a song that lyrically couldn’t be further from our usual band subject matter, being a) very specifically American (when we are almost obsessively British) and b) about sport (a thing which we don’t give a flying shit about.) But it was a great tune, in a good key, and had Candidate’s favourite chord in it (the psych drone that is B5, played with most of the strings open) so that was the song we picked.
‘All Kinds Of Time’ is about a Quarterback, whatever that is, in Colonial US-Rules Leg-Ball, who at the moment of the crucial splashdown to kickdrop the winning hoop and earn the Big Town Sport Cup, finds time stands still, for the length of the song. (It’s a sports-related cousin of another Candidate favourite ‘Sunshine Everyday’ by Swell, but that one’s about being in a car accident, so maybe less uplifting. Same theme, though. It’s about time stopping, feeling in a suspended state of grace.)
And back in 2020, time had stopped. The pandemic meant we had time to get together, and record. We didn’t have anything else pressing to do. The boys in the band who recorded this tribute track all had arts-related jobs, which were either pootling along at a low level, or had stopped entirely, in a state of anxious shock that we couldn’t really do anything about. (It just strikes me that bandmember Alex D had a very different pandemic, as a key worker… and that may be why she’s not on that track… The pandemic was a global event which every single person experienced differently.) But for some of us, it felt that the relentless ticking of adult life had stopped a bit. While we waited, anxiously for normality to return, the pressure had relaxed a little to be ‘doing something useful’ with the day, or to go out and socialise with friends, or not be near friends at all because of work, or whatever usually gets in the way of being in a band with friends when you’re a grown-up.
We had all kinds of time.
But also we knew, thanks to this same pandemic that had given us more time than usual, that we had no time at all. Someone whose work we liked had died. Time was completely finite. It would stop soon. And then what would you think of how you’d spent it?
Adam Schlesinger was roughly our age. He seemed so alive, active, successful, doing great work. He’d only recently produced one of the greatest and most unexpected pop songs of the last decade in ‘Me and Magdelena’ by The Monkees, a song (written by Ben Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie) that linked the ageing Monkees solidly to an endlessly rebootable musical NOW, as fresh as anything the band had ever made. Adam’s beautifully judged version of the song allowed Mickey Dolenz’s ageless, piping voice to soar and play against the vocals of his (maybe more jaded) old friend Mike Nesmith, and seemed to imply that music itself could preserve people forever in an endless, timeless adolescence, a never-ending Laurel Canyon love affair, an eternal Summer friendship.
And then Adam died (as did Nesmith shortly after). And it turned out the truth was that we had no time at all.
After we’d recorded All Kinds Of Time – which turned out to not be about American football at all, really – it seemed obvious that we needed to get the group back together, and make a new album. But it would be one that would be informed by the idea that we should look back and forward, and not care about time, precisely because if you have any time at all, you have as much as you need. It didn’t matter that 16 years had passed, and nobody maybe really cared. We were all still here, and capable of making music, and we should make it as well as we could.
Point Clear is our first record where we didn’t go somewhere else, geographically or in fiction or musical history, in search of inspiration. We looked at ourselves and our families, at where we grew up, and the people who’d come before us, and who they were. And also who we were.
The brothers in the band got a bee in our bonnets that the best music of all is not whatever tops all time great polls, or people list as their ‘favourite record’ to show off when pressured in interview. It’s whatever music you danced to as a teenager, and you shouldn’t pretend otherwise. The best album of all time, as Alex and I laughed to ourselves while making this, might actually be Indie Top 20 Vol VII, if that was your favourite record when music was more important than air. So we made a record that sounded a bit like that.
Because back in 2020-ish, when we were locked down and trapped, and watching people we loved suffer, and people we didn’t know (but admired hugely) die so suddenly and unfairly, we realised that we were lucky to know, with a sharp pang, that we have all kinds of time, and no time at all.
So maybe we should use it.
—
You can hear and buy the new Candidate album using this Bandcamp link.
The record is released on Corduroy Punk records, in shops, or on your usual music service.