Belle And Sebastian - everything is now part one, 2018

"The song begins with a brief instrumental opening, but it transitions quickly into vocals within the first 10-15 seconds, featuring Stuart Murdoch’s voice over a lush arrangement of strings, synths, and percussion."

Slowdive - forty days, 1993

"In the past I always skipped that song. I did not like this slightly out-of-tune intro and therefore only very rarely listened further into the song. But recently at their Hamburg gig I was blown away from that song. It was so dreamy yet so sad. For the rest of the past week I almost exclusively listened to that very song when I was listening to music. I delved into the meaning of the song and learned about its origins. It broke my heart to think about how painful it must have been for Rachel and Neil to have to constantly spend time together after their breakup. Somehow I've rarely felt so intense about a song. When I went through a bad breakup many years ago, I felt the exact same feelings that come back now when I listen to "40 Days." But strangely enough, I can't stop listening to this song."

James - i know what i'm here for live, 1999

"It's about the meaning of life. It's also about the nature of being in a band: the fulfilment of adolescent fantasies of endless drugs, drink and sex. But unless there's self-discipline, it can easily become a nightmare… Initially we did it almost as a blues song, but [producer] Brian Eno came up with the wacky, space-funk hookline. It became the album's first single, to make an announcement that we'e gone into a new musical area."

Ford Chastain - only you, 2025

"Romance lingers from start to finish in Ford Chastain’s new single, “Only You.” This calming slice of dream-pop is an ode to lovers and a celebration of having someone to care for. Chastain’s whispering, gravelly vocals add a relatable intimacy, while the melancholic guitar layers amplify the feeling of yearning."

Belle And Sebastian - the same star, 2018

"Sarah gets to front one song per EP, though in the latter two examples she gets a pretty heavy assist from Stuart, and that’s fine, because I love how these two play off of each other, with a lot of the songs they collaborate on feeling like two sides of a conversation."

Fait-divers by Einstein

"Wondering appears to occur when an experience comes into conflict with a world of concepts already sufficiently fixed within us" (Einstein)

Fait-divers by Nancy Andreasen

"All human beings (and their brains) have to cope with the fact that their five senses gather more information than even the magnificent human brain is able to process. To put this another way: we need to be able to ignore a lot of what is happening around us — the smell of pizza baking, the sound of the cat meowing, or the sight of birds flying outside the window — if we are going to focus our attention and concentrate on what we are doing (in your case, for example, reading this book). Our ability to filter out unnecessary stimuli and focus our attention is mediated by brain mechanisms in regions known as the thalamus and the reticular activating system." (Nancy Andreasen)

Fait-divers on ambiguity

“If there’s any takeaway, it’s that we’re programmed to get rid of ambiguity, and yet if we engage with it we can make better decisions, we can be more creative, and we can even be a little more empathetic.”

Isobel Campbell And Mark Lanegan - cool water, 2010

"With Belle and Sebastian’s Isobel Campbell, he cut three albums that brilliantly inverted the paradigm set by Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra decades earlier (“I write the songs and he’s the eye-candy,” Campbell told me. “Sometimes, we’ll be on stage, and he’s singing The Circus Is Leaving Town, and it sounds so sad, so true, I want to cry”). With longtime friend and kindred spirit Greg Dulli, he recorded a sublime album of soulful regret as the Gutter Twins. He worked alongside PJ Harvey and Slash, and undertook projects with lesser-known talents including Duke Garwood, Soulsavers and Joe Cardamone. His energy was fearsome, his approach fearless; his later albums embraced electronic music (2012’s Blues Funeral) and icy post-punk (2019’s Somebody’s Knocking), his final album, 2020’s Straight Songs of Sorrow, inspired by the experience of writing his memoir."

Fait-divers by Niels Bohr

“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.” (Niels Bohr)

Fait-divers by Jung

"In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order." (C. G. Jung)

Gorillaz - andromeda, 2017

"It was the only place in the whole of the town that played soul music, so there's a connection between the music I used to hear there and the feeling and spirit of the music I was trying to evoke."

The Coral - undercover of the night, 2018

"Now with a whimsical sense of melancholy and romantic melodies, The Coral return with their ninth studio album, ‘Move Through The Dawn’, a mix of big sounds that somehow manages to weave a perfectly crafted sense of innocence deep within each track."

Fait-divers by John Steinbeck on books

"It's almost impossible to read a fine thing without wanting to do a fine thing." John Steinbeck, The Pastures of Heaven

Fait-divers by Paul Kalanithi

"I woke up in pain, facing another day — no project beyond breakfast seemed tenable. I can’t go on, I thought, and immediately, its antiphon responded, completing Samuel Beckett’s seven words, words I had learned long ago as an undergraduate: I’ll go on. I got out of bed and took a step forward, repeating the phrase over and over: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” (Paul Kalanithi)

Slowdive - when the sun hits, 1993

"When the Sun Hits" is a complex and evocative song that captures the essence of the shoegaze sound. It's a song that rewards repeated listening and invites the listener to create their own interpretation of its meaning."

Belle And Sebastian - everything is now part two, 2018

"Two months after the December 2017 release of EP 1, we finally got the payoff promised by its (mostly) instrumental closing track. This time, we’ve got lyrics all the way through, and there’s a sort of satisfaction to finally filling in those blanks and finding out what sort of existential crisis the phrase “Everything is different now” (or alternatively, “Everything’s indifferent now”) was actually referring to. Calm and collected as this song is, Stuart actually seems to be trying to talk someone down from a ledge, where they’re feeling completely hopeless and hemmed in by a cruel fate, ready to call it quits on life altogether."

Fait-divers by Annie Dillard

"The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less." (Annie Dillard)

Fait-divers by Niels Bohr

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” (Niels Bohr)

My Morning Jacket - it beats for you, 2005

"In 2004, a dreamy cover of "Rocket Man" concluded My Morning Jacket's first volume of rarities. Which was prescient, because it's Elton John that Jim James' songs for 2005's Z first bring to mind."

Fait-divers by Thomas Merton

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” (Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island)

Fait-divers by Richard Ford

“If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.” Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

Fait-divers on music and nature

"Our work indicates a consonance between patterns in music and in nature, but how to interpret this is more of a philosophical question"

Fait-divers by Tony Schwartz

"Let go of certainty. The opposite isn't uncertainty. It's openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox." (Tony Schwartz)

Fait-divers by Kurt Vonnegut

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC” (Kurt Vonnegut)

Slowdive - some velvet morning cover, 1993

"Some Velvet Morning" is a song written by Lee Hazlewood and originally recorded by Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra in late 1967. It first appeared on Sinatra's album Movin' with Nancy, the soundtrack to her 1967 television special of the same name, which also featured a performance of the song. It was subsequently released as a single before appearing on the 1968 album Nancy & Lee."

Fait-divers on attention and awareness

The earlier you catch your bad mood, the easier it will be to do something about it.

Fait-divers by Wendell Berry

"A society wishing to endure must speak the language of care-taking, faith-keeping, kindness, neighborliness, and peace." (Wendell Berry)

Fait-divers by John Steinbeck

“Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.” (John Steinbeck)

Belle And Sebastian - the girl doesn't get it, 2018

"The band’s palette might be far broader than it was 20 years ago – the bouncing disco of The Girl Doesn’t Get It contrasting nicely with the stripped-back balladry of There Is an Everlasting Song."

Fait-divers by John Horton Conway

"That’s a curious thing about the nature of mathematical existence. This rule hasn’t physically existed in any sense in the world before a month ago, before I invented it, but it sort of intellectually existed forever. There is this abstract world which in some strange sense has existed throughout eternity. Imagine an uninhabited planet, full of interesting things. You land on it, and it existed for a million years, but no people have ever been there, no sentient beings. There are such places, I’m sure. Go to some remote star and there will be something. But you don’t have to go there. You can sit in this very chair and find something that has existed throughout all of eternity and be the first person to explore it." (John Horton Conway)

Fait-divers on black holes

"as a black hole radiates Hawking radiation, it slowly evaporates until it eventually vanishes. So what happens to all the information encoded on its horizon? Does it disappear, which would violate quantum mechanics? Or is it preserved, as quantum mechanics would predict? One theory is that the Hawking radiation contains all of that information. When the black hole evaporates and disappears, it has already preserved the information of everything that fell into it, radiating it out into the universe."

Fait-divers on storytelling

Stories are our user manuals for life.

Fait-divers by Susan Sontag

"Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human." (Susan Sontag)