The Boss has spent most of today in a visibly irritated state after discovering that Chip Martini apparently attended the Southern Writers Guild grand opening before the rest of us. This, I should clarify immediately, is not a real event anyone from Good Boy Records physically attended. The Southern Writers Guild exists in its own corner of the world, where Hank Cotton, Beau, Grace, assorted wandering musicians, ghost-tour tourists, and mysterious peacocks appear to operate under an entirely separate set of emotional laws from the United Kingdom.

Yesterday evening, shortly after his interview for the Southern Writers Guild with Mr Polk staggered to its conclusion through heat damage, collapsing technology and the general sensation that Britain itself was beginning to simmer gently under the afternoon sun, the Southern Writers Guild published a new piece titled Grand Opening. The Boss read it once in complete silence, then immediately read it again, and somewhere around the second appearance of bourbon, porch guitars, and smoke drifting through Savannah, the atmosphere of the thing appears to have entered his bloodstream permanently.

The problem was not merely that the story worked. Plenty of stories work. The problem was that the place itself felt real in the way certain pieces of writing occasionally do when they stop behaving like fiction and begin behaving more like memory. Not literally real, obviously. No sane person genuinely believes Savannah currently contains a Victorian literary headquarters populated by gospel singers, retired professors, mariachi Elvis musicians and mysterious peacocks occupying velvet furniture with the quiet authority of Tennessee Williams characters. The Boss, however, has never allowed sanity to interfere too heavily with creative work when he’s on a roll.

By midnight, he had become completely fixated on one specific detail. Chip Martini had somehow made it into the Southern Writers Guild story before he had. Not the Boss. Not me. Not even Good Boy Records itself. Chip. The chimpanzee lounge singer in the leopard-print robe had apparently wandered into the warmest, strangest gathering in Georgia while the rest of us remained trapped in West London listening to aircraft thunder over Hounslow in thirty-five degree heat.

“How the hell did Chip get invited to this?” the Boss asked eventually, with what I can only describe as genuine emotional injury.

I considered several possible answers before deciding compassion was probably the wiser route.

The situation deteriorated quietly after that. The Boss kept returning to the piece throughout the evening, not analysing it so much as hovering around it like a man standing outside a house where excellent music is drifting through the windows. Certain details clearly lodged themselves deep inside the machinery. Hank Cotton tending the grill like a sacred duty. Beau somewhere in the background with a guitar, and Grace moving calmly through the whole affair with the confidence of somebody who already knows everybody belongs there before they arrive.

Mostly, though, it was the feeling of the thing that got him. That strange warmth certain stories generate when they capture the sensation of people drifting naturally in and out of songs, conversations and memories, and nobody particularly wants the night to end.

At around one in the morning, the Boss wandered back into the studio muttering fragments about porch lights, Georgia air and smoke drifting through the square. By two, phrases had started appearing in notebooks. By three, the whole thing had very clearly crossed the line from literary admiration into what we at Good Boy Records technically classify as a developing incident.

And so, for reasons nobody entirely understands, one Southern Writers Guild story somehow drifted across the Atlantic, entered an overheated London studio through the open windows, and produced a Southern Writers Guild record. Honestly, at this point, the entire situation is becoming increasingly difficult to explain to insurers.

Be sure to click the download button if you would like to save a copy. You’re welcome.

Southern Writers Guild

Below are the lyrics, included for the crowd who come for the story as much as the sound. This is a one-time indulgence; we normally keep our lyric sheets under heavier lock and key than most government records. But since this week is about the Southern Writers Guild, the doors are open.

The Ugly Ducklin’ say y’all come on in

Hank Cotton got smoke in the sky
Live oaks swayin’ as the cars roll by
Grace on the porch with the lights turned low
Beau in the back let the old songs go

Pecan smoke driftin’ over the square
Cold beer sweatin’ in the Georgia air
Screen door swing and the glasses sing
Whole porch hummin’ like it got six strings

Southern Writers Guild
Porch light burnin’ bright

Southern Writers Guild
Come on in and stay awhile

Southern Writers Guild
Come on in and stay all night

Some folks came just to see the house
Some stayed quiet when the music rolled out
Grace movin’ easy from room to room
Like she’d known that place her whole life through

Beau hit a chord and the whole thing swayed
Hank yelled “Lord, y’all grab a plate!”
Smoke rolled slow through the twilight air
Like the whole damn town had wandered there

Southern Writers Guild
Porch light burnin’ bright

Southern Writers Guild
Come on in and stay awhile

Southern Writers Guild
Come on in and stay all night

Nobody ask where you come from
Nobody care what road you been on
House full of stories and Georgia pine
One more bottle of homemade wine

Grace in the doorway laughin’ low
Beau on the guitar playin’ nice and slow
Hank out back by the firelight glow
Smoke rollin’ soft through the live oak rows

Southern Writers Guild
Porch light burnin’ bright

Southern Writers Guild
Come on in and stay awhile

Southern Writers Guild
Come on in and stay all night

Southern Writers Guild
Whole porch hummin’ like it got six strings

Southern Writers Guild
Porch light burnin’ bright

Codsworth C. Gleason Esq.
Assistant to the Boss,
Head of Everything Else,
Unofficially banned from asking further questions about the peacocks.

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The Boss insisted on conducting today’s Southern Writers Guild interview during the hottest day Britain has experienced since Satan opened a holiday villa in Croydon. By two o’clock, the entire country had become soup.

Roads were melting. Dogs were refusing to bark on medical grounds, and pensioners lay motionless in paddling pools, clutching cans of lager like survivors awaiting evacuation from a failed colonial campaign. Inside Good Boy Records, the studio temperature had risen to the point where several electrical items simply abandoned hope and shut themselves down out of self-respect.

And into this unfolding humanitarian catastrophe stepped MJ Polk.

Readers may remember the original Polk Incident, during which MJ made the disastrous tactical mistake of asking the Boss where Elvis Night at Andy’s came from and accidentally triggered a forty-minute monologue involving Warren Zevon, beach bars, gospel music, motel managers, and enough conversational side roads to require formal planning permission. Analysts later concluded that Polk had asked approximately six questions, one of which survived impact.

Most men would have taken this as a warning from the universe. However, Polk, displaying the courage of a man who either possesses tremendous faith in human conversation or no functioning survival instinct whatsoever, requested another interview.

Complicating matters further, the Boss had opened every window in the studio in a desperate attempt to avoid heatstroke, inadvertently transforming the recording into an auxiliary runway for Heathrow Airport. Readers expecting pristine audio quality should instead prepare for the occasional sound of low-flying jet aircraft interrupting discussions about gospel theology, Steve Marriott, and why Daisy Duke permanently altered the emotional development of working-class British teenagers.

At first, everything appeared perfectly civilised.

There were greetings. Pleasantries. Minor technical adjustments. The Boss requested permission to smoke during proceedings, which under the circumstances felt less like a social courtesy and more like a sea captain calmly asking whether anyone minded if he lit the emergency flare indoors.

Then came the publicity screenshot, and I cannot stress enough that this is where the devil clearly entered the machinery. From that moment onward, the technical quality of the interview deteriorated with the slow inevitability of a Mississippi riverboat casino fire.

“You’ve gone fuzzy,” observed the Boss early on, in what historians will surely rank alongside “perhaps a little weather moving in” as one of the great understatements of modern civilisation.

The audio staggered drunkenly in and out of existence. The video collapsed into soft-focus hallucination, and entire stretches of reality appeared to buffer.

Then Polk froze.

Not briefly. Not artistically. Completely.

Throughout the entire ordeal, MJ remained charming, patient, and astonishingly professional under conditions that would have broken lesser broadcasters. But the unfortunate reality is that the freeze-frame chosen by fate captured him with the exact expression of a deeply courteous Southern gentleman about to offer two boys a glass of lemonade before quietly revealing the swamp out back contains “secrets best left buried.”

The Boss noticed immediately.

A normal human being, upon discovering the host of their interview had frozen solid sometime during the opening pleasantries, might have paused proceedings. The Boss instead interpreted complete electronic paralysis as encouragement and simply accelerated.

What followed was less an interview than a chain-smoking Ken Burns documentary performed inside a collapsing air fryer.

Polk asked what should have been a perfectly manageable question about why a London songwriter feels such emotional kinship with the American South. Any ordinary person would have answered: “I liked the music.”

The Boss, however, took a somewhat wider route.

Within minutes, he had reached Civil War history lessons, fuel rationing in 1970s Britain, Elvis Presley, Daisy Duke, Steve Marriott, gospel theology, Humble Pie, Curtis Mayfield, David Lee Roth, television evangelists, Wilson Pickett, orange Dodge Chargers, and a naked bicyclist who apparently played a crucial role in his educational development.

At one point he became so lost in his own explanation that he had to stop and ask what the original question had been.

Polk, still frozen in benevolent digital amber like a Southern saint trapped inside an overheating iMac, appeared unable to assist.

Most alarming of all was the speed with which the Boss psychologically adapted to the frozen image. By the half-hour mark, he was speaking to Motionless Polk with the complete confidence of a man who had entirely accepted this as the natural state of journalism.

Meanwhile, the Good Boy Records studio itself continued descending into tropical madness.

The Boss chain-smoked continuously through the conversation like a casino owner awaiting federal indictment. The desk fan began making sounds associated with agricultural equipment, and afterwards, the Boss’s iMac crashed so violently during rendering due to the extreme heat that, for several dreadful moments, we believed the interview itself had physically damaged the building.

Somewhere deep in the American South, the heroic Mr Rick West was later summoned to salvage the audio from the digital wreckage like a specialist called in to recover black-box recordings from an aircraft disaster.

Sources close to production describe Mr West as “remaining positive,” which in technical language usually means “drinking heavily but with admirable professionalism.”

But perhaps the single greatest moment came when Polk, in an astonishing act of generosity, gently reassured the Boss:

“I think everybody would be glad to hear all that.”

The Boss stared at the frozen smiling face on his monitor for several long seconds with the baffled expression of a man who had just spent forty-three minutes explaining the spiritual relationship between Steve Marriott, gospel harmonies, and Daisy Duke during a national heat emergency.

“I don’t think so, old boy,” he replied.

And yet somehow, against every known law of structure, pacing, broadcasting, and modern telecommunications, the thing actually works.

Because beneath the melting circuitry, collapsing Wi-Fi, theological detours, Heathrow air traffic, and slowly escalating nicotine fog sat the real answer.

A London kid growing up in grey post-war Britain discovering America through Elvis films, gospel records, Southern rock albums, impossible television mythology, and giant bursts of colour arriving through the screen during an age of shortages, strikes, and ration books. A boy staring at The Dukes of Hazzard the way medieval sailors once stared at maps of Atlantis.

That was the actual conversation.

Unfortunately, it arrived buried beneath enough digressions to qualify for its own rail infrastructure project.

Codsworth C. Gleason Esq.
Assistant to the Boss,
Head of Everything Else,
Still monitoring MJ’s frozen smile for signs of movement.

Discover music from Good Boy Records on Spotify.

Motown had Detroit. Stax had Memphis. Good Boy Records apparently began with the Boss standing in the hallway staring at a framed Father’s Day poem like a man receiving instructions from the dead.

The poem was written by his daughter Poppy, who arrived from Yorkshire carrying the framed piece under one arm and, although none of us realised it at the time, the complete collapse of domestic stability under the other.

It was called “My Dad’s Favourite Colour is Yellow.”

Mrs Boss took one look at the Boss silently studying this thing on the wall three or four times a day and immediately recognised the warning signs.

Now, to be fair, Mrs Boss has known the Boss a very long time. She understands the rhythms of these situations. The narrowing eyes. The pacing. The muttering. The sudden appearance of notebooks. The look of a man who has accidentally wandered into another “phase.” Her exact phrase, I believe, was: “Oh Christ. He’s starting something.”

And she was absolutely right.

Because around the same time, the Boss became convinced that a stranger in the park had delivered some sort of cosmic instruction for him to stop moping about and start writing songs again. Personally, I remain deeply suspicious of any spiritual awakening that takes place within thirty feet of a duck pond, but there we are.

Then one evening, while once again staring at Poppy’s framed poem like a retired sea captain studying naval charts, the Boss remembered seeing one of those AI music demonstrations online. Now this is normally the sort of thing the Boss watches for six minutes before loudly declaring civilisation finished and going off to make tea.

But this one lingered.

Mostly because the poem was already doing something strange to him. Not in a mystical way. Nothing so dramatic. More in the sense that he kept reading it aloud under his breath like a man trying to work out why a melody was hiding inside the words.

Most people would have tried the AI thing once, laughed nervously, and returned to normal society.

Not the Boss.

Because here is the important bit: he never wanted to rewrite the poem because the poem already worked. Poppy had instinctively repeated the line: “My dad’s favourite colour is yellow.” And the Boss heard it immediately. Not as poetry.

As a hook.

So he fed the poem into the machine, pressed play, and accidentally detonated the entire Good Boy Records universe. That was it.

My Dad’s Favourite Colour is Yellow

© 2026 Good Boy Records / Poppy Gillman

Floodgates. Not because “AI started making music,” which is the sort of sentence people say on LinkedIn before being quietly unfollowed by their families. No. What actually happened was far stranger.

The Boss suddenly started hearing songs again.

Old demos. Half-finished lyrics. Southern rock ideas. Country songs. Abandoned fragments from the Magic Ship years. Strange little scraps buried in drawers and old cassette tapes turning up like emotional unexploded ordnance.

Within weeks, the house was full of guitars, coffee cups, muttering, late-night mixes, studio jargon, alarming quantities of MP3 files, and a fictional chimpanzee in leopard print called Chip Martini demanding recording budgets.

Mrs Boss, meanwhile, stood in the middle of all this unfolding chaos with the exhausted expression of a woman whose husband’s real hobby has always been collecting hobbies.

She knew. She always knows.

I suspect the exact moment she realised the situation had become critical was when Poppy casually said: “Well, it’s not like any of it is on Spotify, is it?”

This turned out to be an extraordinarily dangerous thing to say to the Boss.

Because shortly afterwards, there were releases. Then albums. Then even more albums. This was followed by Substack essays, the creation of a fictional studio in Memphis, and before I could look up, an entire imaginary record label mythology appeared at such a speed that even I began struggling to maintain the paperwork for all the catering.

Now, the whole peculiar thing has come full circle in the nicest possible way.

The Boss first wandered into Stories from the Jukebox, reminiscing about Southern rock, Melissa, guitars, and the general musical chaos of growing up in West London.

And now, somehow, wonderfully, Poppy herself has stepped into the orbit with a lovely piece of writing of her own, responding to all of it from the other side of the living room.

Mrs Boss, meanwhile, maintains this was merely another example of the Boss collecting hobbies at industrial speed, and frankly, her version of events is becoming rather difficult to challenge.

Codsworth C. Gleason, Esq.
Assistant to the Boss,
Head of Everything Else,
Currently watching the hallway for early signs of the next phase.

More good music from Good Boy Records on Spotify below

The Boss has spent most of this morning explaining to me why he no longer wishes to be in a real band, and frankly, I now require both a restorative sherry and possibly a licensed therapist.

It all began because his daughter asked an innocent question. The sort of harmless family observation that accidentally detonates forty years of unresolved musical psychology over breakfast.

“Why don’t you make Southern rock records?”

Now, on paper, this is a perfectly reasonable thing to ask. The Boss adores Southern rock. He worships groove, swagger, giant guitars, gospel backing singers, men named things like Duane, and any record that sounds as though it was made by heavily sleep-deprived musicians in a studio containing at least one ashtray on fire.

His mother, God bless her, spent the 1970s chain-smoking Embassy Regals while blasting Santana through the house at volume levels now outlawed by several international treaties. Rod Stewart’s face was physically attached to the coal cupboard door for a period so long that visiting children assumed he was a relative.

The woman adored the Faces. If Stay With Me came on Top of the Pops, she’d immediately start strutting around the living room with a fag in one hand like she was warming up to steal Ronnie Wood.

Meanwhile, the Boss absorbed all this unconsciously through nicotine haze and transistor radio osmosis, only to somehow spend most of his adult life trapped in British rock bands with men who thought subtlety was a contagious disease.

And this, dear readers, is where things become interesting. Because, contrary to popular myth, the Boss did not “nearly” have a music career.

He had one.

Not the glamorous version, admittedly. Nobody hurled televisions from hotel windows. Nobody dated members of Fleetwood Mac. But songs were written. Albums were recorded. Gigs were played. Audiences appeared. Industry people circled cautiously like wildlife approaching an unstable picnic.

And the Boss himself became utterly, completely, magnificently possessed.

When I say possessed, I mean Captain Ahab possessed.

You have never seen a more driven human being in your life.

The man bought music industry handbooks the size of paving slabs and treated them like military strategy documents. Label contacts. Radio DJs. Promoters. Journalists. Managers. He attacked the British music industry with the organisational intensity of a man preparing to invade Belgium using only demo CDs and telephone persistence.

At one point, he was simultaneously running his own business, raising a family, fronting a band, organising gigs, networking constantly, chasing radio play, and attempting to drag Magic Ship toward professional status through sheer force of deranged optimism. Sleep during this period was viewed as an administrative weakness.

And then, somehow, it started working.

Radio Caroline got hold of the album. The late Jim Ross played it on air and more or less lost his mind. Not only did he make Magic Ship Artist of the Week, he brought them BACK the following week and publicly announced that it was now his personal mission to get the band signed.

The Boss still has recordings of this somewhere, presumably stored beside the nuclear launch codes and several obsolete guitar leads.

Then came the Battle of the Bands competition.

Magic Ship won it.

The title track of their album LoveTelMotel ended up attached to the front cover of Classic Rock magazine itself, which remains one of the most gloriously surreal sentences ever produced by Good Boy Records considering the band had previously spent years rehearsing in rooms smelling faintly of damp carpet and emotional compromise.

Industry chatter began.

A bloke came to a gig and reportedly informed his brother, who apparently had label connections, that he needed to come and see the band immediately.

The Half Moon Putney entered the picture. Proper dressing rooms. Towels. Soundchecks. Sound engineers. The sort of venue where musicians suddenly begin talking as though they’re one silk scarf away from joining Fleetwood Mac.

And this, according to the Boss, is precisely where the trouble began.

Because while he had gone full Captain Ahab and was now chasing the whale directly into the storm, the rest of the band slowly started realising the whale might actually exist.

You see, everybody loves the idea of being in a band right up until the moment it threatens to become your actual life.

That’s when people start remembering mortgages.

The Boss is now fairly certain the rest of Magic Ship had quietly assumed none of this would ever really happen. Oh, they enjoyed the gigs. They enjoyed the songs. They enjoyed the fantasy. But deep down they thought it would remain a very enjoyable hobby involving applause and lager.

Then, suddenly, Jim Ross is screaming on offshore radio that you’re the greatest unsigned band he’s ever heard.

Classic Rock magazine is turning up.

Industry people are sniffing around.

And the Boss has begun moving through rehearsals with the focused energy of a man who has already mentally accepted a BRIT Award.

At which point, one evening, the band finally cracked and delivered the sort of sentence capable of ending entire civilisations.

“We just want to be weekend warriors.”

Now, readers, I was not physically present for this conversation, but based on the Boss’s reconstruction of events, there was a silence in the rehearsal room so profound that somewhere in North London a pint glass exploded spontaneously.

Because the Boss did not want to be a weekend warrior.

The Boss wanted the whale.

And the moment he realised he was the only lunatic aboard the ship willing to chase it into open water, the whole thing detonated theatrically.

The band, according to the Boss, had become a democracy. Which sounds lovely in theory until you remember democracies famously struggle when one member has become a completely unhinged nineteenth-century sea captain pursuing destiny through weather systems.

So the Boss reacted in the calm and measured fashion for which he remains widely respected: He sacked the entire band and went to Spain.

Honestly, if British music history were written properly, half of it would sound exactly like this.

One minute you’re on Radio Caroline being proclaimed the future of rock music. The next you’re drinking lager near Benidorm watching an Elvis impersonator while trying not to have a nervous breakdown.

And somewhere inside all this chaos sat Exasperation Station.

The song itself arrived during Britain’s brief mid-2000s glam-rock cocaine renaissance, otherwise known as “the period where Towers of London kept appearing on television behaving like a pirate mutiny in eyeliner.”

The Boss found them hysterically funny.

One evening, he was at the kitchen table trying to write this huge swaggering glam-rock catastrophe anthem while Donny Tourette ranted on television like a man who had personally declared war on moderation. Simultaneously, two newly acquired kittens were launching themselves around the room attacking pens, climbing onto notebooks, biting noses, knocking over beer bottles and generally behaving like tiny furry cocaine dealers.

Somewhere in the middle of this domestic collapse, the phrase Exasperation Station appeared in the notebook.

And unlike several members of Magic Ship, the Boss immediately recognised greatness when he saw it.

Now, to be fair, the band absolutely had a proper crack at the song. This is not one of those bitter old-musician stories where the Boss sits in darkness muttering about misunderstood genius while polishing old setlists. No, the deeper problem was much simpler. By this point, the Boss had already mentally outgrown the entire ecosystem.

The songs in his head were becoming bigger, stranger, looser, more cinematic, more emotional, more dangerous. Meanwhile, the practical realities of keeping four human beings aligned behind one impossible dream had become about as stable as a shopping trolley on black ice.

And then, many years later, something extremely peculiar happened.

The music-making tools arrived.

Not “AI replacing musicians.” The Boss has absolutely no interest in having that conversation with men who photograph vinyl records for social media despite being unable to clap in time to Happy Birthday.

No, what happened was far more personal than that. The songs finally got out.

That was it.

For the first time in his life, the Boss could actually hear the records in his head without needing rehearsal politics, compromise, scheduling, transport logistics, budget arguments, singer issues, or somebody saying:

“Can we make it a bit more punk rock?”

And once that door opened, there was absolutely no going back.

Which is why Good Boy Records now exists somewhere between a soul label, a comedy routine, a nervous condition, and a highly organised act of musical liberation.

Frankly, after hearing all this over several drinks, I’m amazed the man didn’t become a gospel singer operating from a houseboat on the Mississippi.

The funny thing is, after all this, he probably could make the Southern rock records his daughter was talking about. In fact, given enough coffee and emotional instability, he almost certainly will at some point. But that was never really the point.

The point was that he had already lived through the bit where music involved rehearsal rooms, negotiations, compromises, favours, vans, politics, logistics, and men saying things like, “Can we just do covers tonight because Dave’s tired?”

He already climbed that mountain once.

These days, if the Boss wants giant backing singers, glam-rock chaos, Detroit grooves, gospel uplift, or enough percussion to frighten a medium-sized horse, he simply opens the studio door at Good Boy Records and gets on with it.

Which, after watching him pursue rock stardom through British rehearsal rooms with the deranged focus of a Victorian sea captain, strikes me as a perfectly reasonable arrangement.

Anyway, the song is below.

The kittens eventually calmed down.

Donny Tourette presumably didn’t.

Exasperation Station

© 2026 Good Boy Records

Codsworth C. Gleason, Esq.
Assistant to the Boss,
Head of Everything Else,
Acting Director of Whale Pursuit Operations.

Discover more good music from Good Boy Records on Spotify

The Boss has spent the better part of this week staring at photographs of billionaires with the concentration of a man attempting to decode military intelligence. At first, I assumed this would result in one of his periodic speeches about the collapse of civilisation, usually delivered while standing in the kitchen holding a mug of tea he has forgotten to drink. Instead, he became strangely thoughtful and announced, quite sincerely, that nobody ever talks about what it must actually be like to be the woman in those photographs.

Now, this caught me off guard somewhat because the modern internet tends to approach these women as though they are personally responsible for every social injustice since the invention of offshore banking. One glimpse of a yacht, a diamond bracelet, or a suspiciously expensive face cream and half the world immediately starts foaming at the mouth like villagers spotting Dracula’s carriage rolling through town.

But the Boss was not interested in sneering at them. Quite the opposite, in fact. He became oddly sympathetic. “It’s a job,” he said, pacing around the room like a man who had accidentally wandered into sociology. “People think these women are just sitting there drinking cocktails, but there’s pressure involved. It’s performance. It’s image. It’s diplomacy. Half the time they’re probably running the whole operation while some billionaire lunatic is on the phone trying to buy Greenland.”

And somewhere in the middle of all this, a song emerged.

Let It Slide

© 2026 Good Boy Records

Personally, I tried to maintain a degree of moral seriousness throughout proceedings, although I will admit that this became increasingly difficult once the Boss started showing me photographs of Mediterranean terraces roughly the size of Hampshire. I remain deeply suspicious of excessive wealth as a concept, naturally, but I am also not blind. Some of those people appear to be having an absolutely tremendous time.

One woman was being served what looked like a fresh martini beside a heated infinity pool at sunset while wearing sunglasses that probably cost more than the entire Good Boy Records refreshments budget for 2026. Meanwhile, I was sitting three feet away from a man trying to balance an ashtray on a guitar amplifier while explaining why “normal people don’t understand linen.”

You begin to see how standards can slip.

The more the Boss talked about the song, the clearer it became that he wasn’t interested in mocking the so-called trophy wife at all. He was interested in the arrangement itself. The silent agreements. The understanding that certain questions simply do not get asked once life reaches a particular level of comfort. Not because these women are fools, but because human beings can adapt remarkably quickly to warm weather, expensive candles, and somebody appearing every twenty minutes with a tray of small attractive snacks.

And honestly, who among us is entirely certain we would behave differently?

That is the uncomfortable little thread running through the whole thing. The woman in Let It Slide is not naïve. She sees the calls being taken behind closed doors. She notices people suddenly disappearing from one social circle and materialising in another. She understands perfectly well that money leaves fingerprints everywhere. But she also understands that once your life becomes sufficiently beautiful, morality itself starts dressing more casually for dinner.

The Boss, of course, found all this fascinating because he has always been drawn toward characters living inside contradictions. Also because he enjoys writing songs that sound fantastic while quietly implying everybody involved may be spiritually doomed.

As for myself, I remain a man of principle. Nevertheless, if some elegant billionaire’s wife wishes to hire an experienced British assistant capable of organising cocktail hours, polishing dramatic anecdotes, and maintaining excellent sherry discipline aboard a 300-foot yacht in the South of France, I feel it would be irresponsible not to at least hear the offer out.

Particularly given that my current employer recently attempted to fix a lamp with gaffer tape and what he described as “general confidence.”

Codsworth C. Gleason, Esq.
Assistant to the Boss,
Head of Everything Else,
Currently wondering whether “villa staff” receive dental.

Did we mention there’s more good music from Good Boy Records on Spotify?

The Boss spent this morning rediscovering a forgotten track while standing in the kitchen dressed like a man who had recently lost an argument with sleep.

The song in question was “Cool Breeze Through the Kitchen Window,” a warm, soulful little number from the House of Shades sessions which, until approximately 8:14 this morning, had been quietly existing on YouTube with the commercial footprint of an abandoned garden rake.

Six views.

Six.

Frankly, we have seen obscure Lithuanian accordion tutorials attracting larger crowds.

Naturally, this triggered what can only be described as a full domestic soul revival. Coffee was reheated twice. Cigarettes vanished at alarming speed. The Boss stood staring out of the kitchen window while nodding solemnly at his own chord changes like a retired session musician remembering where he buried the good whiskey.

And here’s the irritating part: the song is actually lovely.

Big warm Southern soul groove. Piano rolling underneath everything like sunlight through old curtains. A genuinely delightful guitar break that arrives halfway through the track with the confidence of a man entering a barbecue carrying expensive coleslaw.

There is also, I should note, an ending so charmingly understated it practically winks at you before leaving the room.

The House of Shades album itself got somewhat lost during the Great Good Boy Records Release Avalanche, when records were emerging from the building faster than sensible scheduling could reasonably accommodate. As a result, several genuinely excellent songs slipped quietly into the catalogue while everyone was distracted by gospel choirs, imaginary studios, emotional breakdowns, and whatever the hell else was happening that month.

Still, this morning belonged to “Cool Breeze Through the Kitchen Window.”

For three minutes and change, the kitchen became a 1974 soul documentary, the sunlight hit the table correctly, and the Boss briefly remembered that sometimes the old songs are waiting for you as much as you are waiting for them.

He is now preparing for an ECG, blood pressure checks, and a blood test, which remains one of the least convincing rock-and-roll lifestyles ever attempted.

Codsworth C. Gleason, Esq.
Assistant to the Boss,
Head of Everything Else,
Acting Curator of Extremely Low-Traffic Summer Soul Classics.

Even more music to ignore from Good Boy Records on Spotify

There are cats, and then there are unofficial borough officials with whiskers. Harry, or Hazza, as the Boss refers to him, belonged firmly in the second category.

By the time the Boss knew him in the late eighties, Hazza already looked like a veteran of several difficult governments, two pub refurbishments, and at least one harsh winter spent inside stationary vehicles. He was very much a seventies model cat. Worn around the edges, slightly nicotine-coloured in places, and entirely unbothered by modern expectations.

The Boss fell in love with him immediately, which surprised nobody because he has always had a weakness for old drifters, lost causes, and creatures carrying visible evidence of life having happened to them.

In many ways, it was like watching somebody meet himself in cat form.

Hazza lived back at the old maisonette in one of those long London streets where everybody vaguely knows each other’s business without ever formally agreeing to. Little front gardens. Brick gateposts. Split-level doors. Pensioners behind curtains conducting neighbourhood reconnaissance with the intensity of Cold War satellite operators.

And there, almost every afternoon, sat Hazza.

Black, though time and weather had clearly entered negotiations with the original paintwork many years earlier. Thin in the way only old street cats can be thin. Fur hanging off him in mysterious directions like forgotten pub carpet after a difficult New Year’s Eve. Eyes half-closed against the sunlight with the expression of a creature who had long ago concluded that urgency was for other people.

Nobody actually owned him. Hazza considered ownership a vulgar administrative detail. He simply drifted through the neighbourhood collecting warmth, sympathy, and occasional canned fish products with the calm professionalism of a man who knows every side entrance to every pub in town. While the younger cats were busy conducting armed territorial disputes behind wheelie bins at three in the morning, Hazza had identified the true engine of civilisation: old ladies, warm porches, and people unable to resist saying “aww, look at the state of him.”

Frankly, one respects the strategy.

The real tactical masterstroke involved the old people’s home behind the back garden wall. Somewhere along the line, Hazza had clearly realised that pensioners represented a far more stable long-term food investment than fighting other cats over compost bins in the rain. While younger tomcats were out trying to establish dominance through violence and poor judgment, Hazza had quietly built an entire social support network based on emotional manipulation and advanced sausage acquisition.

The old devil practically had a pension plan.

And somehow, during the current Dibblesound Studios situation - which increasingly feels like somebody left a seventies recording studio running overnight without proper supervision - the Boss started talking about Hazza again.

One minute he was looking out the studio window watching another local old rogue called Bobby wandering slowly across the street outside the house opposite, and the next minute he’d disappeared into one of those reflective moods that usually ends with either a new song or minor electrical damage.

Apparently, Bobby had once wandered into the house and gone upstairs to sleep on the bed like a travelling salesman checking into a hotel. Another time he came casually through the living room window, landed elegantly on the carpet, spotted Dibble asleep on the floor, silently reconsidered every decision that had led him there, then immediately turned round and left without comment.

Street cats understand diplomacy.

Somewhere inside all this, Hazza came wandering back out of memory. And this is where Good Boy Records once again found itself facing an uncomfortable truth: the Boss had accidentally written a genuinely lovely little soul record about a freeloading alley cat.

The resulting evidence can be heard below.

Just Passing Through

© 2026 Good Boy Records

Not a novelty song. Not one of those comedy records involving meowing and banjos and public shame. Good Lord, no. “Just Passing Through” turned into something far stranger than that. A warm, easygoing street-soul groove about drifting through life without ever really belonging anywhere too permanently.

The groove itself strolls rather than struts. Little lazy horn replies. Soft drums. Warm bass. The whole thing moves like sunlight crawling slowly across brickwork while somebody leaves a door open for a creature they claim not to care about.

And threaded through it all is Hazza.

Sleeping in porches.

Warming himself in engine bays during winter.

Appearing without invitation.

Leaving without explanation.

The line about “finding a place all dressed in white” came directly from one of his greatest criminal offences.

The upstairs neighbour had just redecorated her flat in magnificent cream carpeting. Wall-to-wall. Stairs included. A level of optimism rarely seen outside luxury yacht brochures. Feeling sorry for Hazza one cold evening, she invited him in overnight.

The next morning she knocked on the Boss’s door looking like somebody who had recently witnessed a maritime disaster.

The flat appeared to have suffered some kind of low-level fur detonation. Black fluff everywhere. Ancient mysterious fibres embedded deep into the carpet. Little drifting clumps of elderly street cat distributed across the premises like industrial fallout.

Hazza himself had already vanished into the morning without apology, explanation, or forwarding address. And that was the thing about him.

He belonged to everyone a little bit and nobody completely.

Some creatures become part of the geography of a place. Not pets exactly. More like recurring weather. You look out the window, see them sitting there on the wall, and somehow the street feels correct.

Eventually the people unofficially looking after Hazza had to move away, and because this was still the old version of Britain where local newspapers occasionally cared about things other than property prices and national collapse, a photographer came round to take his picture for a little rehoming story.

There he sat on the wall like a retired gangster attending his own civic ceremony.

And beautifully, somebody nearby took him in. Though one strongly suspects Hazza himself merely viewed this as an extension of existing services.

In any case, he now lives forever inside “Just Passing Through,” still wandering from warm room to warm room through a little laid-back soul groove the Boss somehow pulled out of memory while staring out the studio window at another ageing street cat across the road.

Which is probably the most Good Boy Records sentence ever written.

Codsworth C. Gleason, Esq.
Assistant to the Boss,
Head of Everything Else,
Currently checking the spare room for elderly trespassers and emotionally manipulative freeloaders.

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Oh dear, the Boss returned from today’s interview with Mr. Polk looking like a man who had accidentally talked through an international landing slot.

He entered the studio slowly, removed his glasses with visible fatigue, and sat down in the chair opposite the mixing desk with the expression of somebody who had just spent an hour explaining the history of civilisation to a taxi driver who merely asked whether he wanted the airport route or the tunnel.

“I may have gone on a bit,” he said.

Now, for newer readers, it is important to understand that the phrase “gone on a bit” has a very specific meaning inside Good Boy Records. It does not mean “slightly over-excited.” Nor does it imply “mild over-explanation.”

Here, it usually means a casual question has detonated a forty-minute monologue involving at least three unrelated music documentaries, a forgotten nightclub in Europe, and a supporting anecdote about a bloke the Boss once met outside a kebab shop in 1987 who “understood groove properly.”

Today’s catastrophe began harmlessly enough.

Mr. Polk invited the Boss onto a live video chat to discuss Elvis Night at Andy’s, the current Stories From The Jukebox creative writing prompt.

The arrangement was civilised. Respectable, even. A quick twenty-minute conversation between two writers discussing songs, memory, inspiration, and process.

The sort of thing normal people do every day without requiring emergency beverage service or post-event counselling. Unfortunately, Mr. Polk made one critical tactical mistake.

He asked where the song came from.

At this point, the interview stopped being an interview and became a fully mobile narrative weather system.

The original answer lasted approximately twelve seconds before expanding violently outward into Spain, the Boss’s old band MagicShip, Warren Zevon, a missed TV slot on Sky Television, Southern rock blogs, Spanish beach bars, Brazilian carnival dancers, gospel choirs, Soft Machine, AI songwriting, motel managers, Memphis soul, Jim Morrison, and something called chicken soup cheese, which entered the conversation with such confidence one could only assume everybody else already knew what it was.

They did not.

To his enormous credit, Mr. Polk handled the situation magnificently. Several times he attempted to guide the discussion gently back toward the original topic, waiting patiently for what appeared to be a natural pause in proceedings.

This proved impossible because the Boss does not actually speak in pauses.

He speaks in branching river systems.

Every answer opened at least four new exits. By the twenty-minute mark, the conversation had generated enough abandoned side roads to support its own public transport infrastructure.

At one stage, what had begun as a discussion about a song in a Spanish beach bar somehow evolved into a detailed explanation of how a failed attempt to create a godless gospel album eventually led to the invention of Chip Martini, an imaginary chimpanzee recording artist operating out of a fictional Memphis studio with a leopard-print wardrobe and surprisingly strong opinions on backing vocals.

No one involved seemed entirely certain how they had arrived there.

Witnesses later described the moment Warren Zevon entered the discussion as “the point where containment became impossible.”

The true scale of the incident only became clear afterwards during footage review. Analysts confirmed that Mr. Polk had asked approximately six questions during the interview.

The Boss answered one of them.

The remaining five became absorbed into an ever-expanding cinematic universe involving Southern audience etiquette, old Athens music blogs, Elvis theology, memoir writing, gospel harmonies, and a Spanish Elvis impersonator performing Suspicious Minds on a stack of beer crates while the Boss’s increasingly traumatised children questioned his judgment from underneath a beach parasol.

At one point, entirely unprompted, the Boss referred to himself as “the king of the unheard and the emperor of the unplayed.” This statement has now been formally entered into the Good Boy Records archive and will almost certainly appear on novelty merchandise before the end of the fiscal year.

Elsewhere, several members of staff were reportedly forced to abandon routine duties after the interview drifted into an unexpected analysis of British live audiences and why, according to the Boss, they “don’t clap properly anymore.”

One intern has not been seen since the phrase:

“Now this all really started with Warren Zevon…”

And yet, despite the chaos, the wandering roads, the abandoned documentaries, and the conversational debris field left behind by a man physically incapable of brevity, something unexpectedly lovely emerged from the wreckage.

Because underneath all the digressions was the real story.

A songwriter carrying a song around for twenty years.

A failed band.

A holiday in Spain.

A white jumpsuit in a beach bar.

A borrowed pen on the flight home.

A line from Warren Zevon lodged permanently somewhere in the soul.

That was the actual thing sitting underneath all the noise.

The reason the Boss talks about songs the way ancient sailors used to describe storms is because, to him, music is not organised neatly in folders. Everything connects to everything else eventually. Songs become memories. Memories become cities. Cities become albums. Albums become imaginary recording studios in Memphis run by a chimpanzee wearing leopard print while everybody else quietly tries to maintain structural integrity around him.

That is how Good Boy Records happened in the first place. And honestly, thank God Mr. Polk asked the question.

The interview itself may have overrun slightly. Several clocks in the surrounding area reportedly gave up halfway through. But somewhere between the beach bar, the gospel choirs, the dead-end side roads, and the increasingly concerned look in Mr. Polk’s eyes, Elvis Night at Andy’s finally got told the way it was always supposed to be told.

Not cleanly.

Not briefly.

But truthfully.

Mr. Polk survived admirably and is expected to make a full recovery.

Though sources close to the production confirm future interviews may now include scheduled water breaks and a small emergency team trained specifically in conversational extraction techniques.

Codsworth C. Gleason Esq.
Assistant to the Boss,
Head of Everything Else,
Still attempting to determine how Wisconsin cheese entered a discussion about Elvis Presley.

Discover music from Good Boy Records on Spotify

The Boss announced last night that Dibble had become “increasingly unreliable during active protection details,” which is not, strictly speaking, the sort of sentence one expects to hear while somebody is trying to locate the television remote with a cigarette already burning in the same hand.

Naturally, I assumed this referred to the fox situation.

For the past several months, Dibble has maintained a deeply personal cold war with a fox believed to be operating somewhere behind the rear fence line. Surveillance remains constant. Garden patrols continue at all hours. A flowerbed near the hydrangeas is now effectively occupied territory. Neither side appears willing to compromise.

But no. This was different.

The Boss clarified, with the smoky fatigue of a man who has spent too long discussing operational procedure with somebody who once ate an entire unattended sausage roll in under four seconds, that Dibble had “started viewing the evening pub walk as executive protection work.”

And suddenly everything made sense, because Dibble does not believe he is “going for a walk.” That is merely the human translation.

Dibble believes he is escorting a vulnerable civilian asset through a volatile urban environment filled with suspicious males, unstable energies, dropped food, loud voices, rogue bicycles, and individuals whose intentions cannot immediately be verified.

Which, in fairness, describes most British high streets after about half past seven.

The route itself is completely ordinary. Damp pavements glowing beneath tired orange streetlights, with traffic hissing softly through wet roads. Somebody is arguing outside the kebab shop, while someone else is laughing too loudly outside the pub smoking area. At the same time, the evening air fills gently with nicotine, chips, lager, and the distant possibility of poor decision-making.

The Boss, meanwhile, shuffles onward in his long coat under what can only be described as moderate but determined pre-pub intoxication, while occasionally stopping to greet people he vaguely recognises from somewhere around 2009.

But Dibble experiences this entire operation differently. For him, every doorway becomes a threat vector. Every fast-moving stranger requires assessment, and each unexpected movement triggers immediate recalculation.

And hovering somewhere between the low-level tension of the streetlights and the drifting smell of chips came the central revelation behind Take Me Out Tonight: the dog does not view himself as a pet.

He views himself as protection. Not a companion. No, he considers himself the Boss’s Head of Security.

The last sober man in a collapsing civilisation.

What makes this especially funny is that Dibble is not remotely suave. He is not one of those elegant, aristocratic dogs who glide silently through life like a minor duke visiting Tuscany. Dibble is pure working-class Scooby-Doo energy. If the doorbell rings unexpectedly, he launches vertically into the air like somebody has detonated a flashbang in the hallway before immediately howling at the situation with tremendous commitment and absolutely no clear strategy.

Toddlers carrying ice creams at unsafe angles are treated as active opportunities.

Unattended sandwiches disappear with military efficiency.

And when he was younger, he once ran into a woman in the park at such catastrophic speed that witnesses later described the event less as “a collision” and more as “a small traffic incident involving a pick-up truck.” The Boss has never emotionally recovered from the paperwork.

Still, somewhere underneath all the chaos sits the real story, because Dibble has quietly been there through everything.

The late-night writing sessions. The abandoned songs. The muttered choruses at two in the morning. The records that worked. The records that wandered halfway into existence before collapsing somewhere near the kettle beside an ashtray full of exhausted ideas. Every version of Good Boy Records has had this dog wandering around in the background like an unpaid studio supervisor with strong opinions about snacks and perimeter control.

And perhaps that is why this ridiculous song landed with such strange emotional force.

Ten years ago the Boss’s wife made a decision. She looked at a man working alone too much, thinking too much, drifting a little too far inside his own head, and announced - correctly, as it turns out - that it was time he had a dog.

This was not universally welcomed at first.

The household, historically speaking, leaned heavily toward cats.

But somewhere between Battersea Dogs Home and the moment Dibble first walked through the door, the entire shape of life changed a little. Not dramatically. Not theatrically. Just quietly, steadily, permanently. The kind of change you only fully notice years later, when you realise there has not been a single day since when the dog was not somewhere nearby while life was happening.

Which is probably why Take Me Out Tonight works.

Underneath the Southern soul strut, the nightclub language, the mock bodyguard psychology, and the low-slung groove about “handling situations out back,” what you are really hearing is a love song from a man to the creature who followed him through an entire chapter of his life and never once questioned the assignment.

Naturally, Dibble himself remains entirely unmoved by this emotional interpretation and is currently asleep upside down on the sofa after spending the afternoon attempting to intimidate a squirrel he appears to believe is selling information to the foxes.

Security operations continue.

Codsworth C. Gleason, Esq.
Assistant to the Boss,
Head of Everything Else,
Acting Director of Public House Tactical Readiness and Advanced Sausage Interception.

Discover more good music from Good Boy Records on Spotify

There are certain things one expects to encounter while idly wandering the outer edges of American television. Used car dealerships, certainly. Men attempting to sell knives capable of surviving nuclear winter. Lawyers who appear to specialise exclusively in billboard litigation involving neck injuries sustained near swamps.

What one does not necessarily expect, particularly at two-thirty in the morning with a cup of tea going cold beside the sofa, is to stumble upon a gentleman in a French Blue coloured suit explaining the mechanics of eternal salvation with the cadence of a man unveiling a new line of luxury patio furniture.

And yet there he was.

Perfect teeth. Hair arranged with the structural confidence of a reinforced motorway bridge. A smile so calm and unwavering it suggested either profound spiritual certainty or access to pharmaceutical technology not yet available to the civilian population.

Behind him stood dozens of people swaying gently beneath theatrical lighting while a Hammond organ moved through the room like warm treacle. Somewhere off-camera, one sensed, a private jet was being polished to within an inch of beatification.

The Boss watched this spectacle with the fascinated concentration of a Victorian explorer encountering a previously undocumented tribe of rhinestone accountants.

“Look at this,” he said eventually, not blinking.

Now, here in Britain, religion traditionally arrives wearing slightly damp shoes and apologising for the inconvenience. A vicar appears near a village green, says something reassuring about forgiveness, and disappears quietly before anybody becomes uncomfortable. It is, generally speaking, a low-wattage affair.

American televangelism, by contrast, appears to have been designed by men who looked at Las Vegas and thought:

“Yes… but what if God had fabulous lighting?”

Naturally, the Boss became completely obsessed.

Not with faith itself, you understand. That would be far too straightforward and emotionally healthy. No, what fascinated him was the machinery of it all. The performance. The choreography. The extraordinary smoothness with which spiritual reassurance had been fused with branding, logistics, camera blocking, direct marketing, tax strategy, and what appeared to be the customer-retention techniques of a mid-level casino loyalty scheme.

Which is how the song Dirty Preacher arrived.

Not storming through the doors in righteous fury, but sliding into the room slow and easy like a man who already owns the building and would quite appreciate it if you filled out the donation envelope correctly before leaving.

And this, I think, is what makes the song so gloriously unsettling.

The preacher in Dirty Preacher does not believe himself to be a villain. Quite the opposite. He sees himself as organised, efficient, and a facilitator of emotional infrastructure - a provider of uplift with moderate overheads and excellent regional reach.

He doesn’t rant or threaten hellfire. He simply explains, in the tone of a man discussing sensible pension arrangements, that:

“Faith got a value… I manage the exchange.”

At which point the Boss, naturally, set the entire thing to one of the smoothest Southern soul grooves to emerge from Dibblesound Studios in recent memory.

Because if there is one thing more alarming than a corrupt televangelist, it is a corrupt televangelist with immaculate rhythm.

The truly dangerous thing about Dirty Preacher is that for the first minute or so you barely notice what is happening. The groove is too warm. The vocal too relaxed. The whole thing moves with the lazy confidence of a man pouring expensive bourbon into heavy crystal while explaining why the Lord would very much like to discuss recurring monthly contributions.

By the second chorus you are nodding along.

By the third, you have accidentally financed an extension to the ministry.

Dirty Preacher

Musically, the track sits somewhere in that glorious territory where American soul music becomes simultaneously seductive and faintly morally suspicious. One can practically smell polished wood, expensive aftershave, stage lights warming velvet curtains, and the terrifying possibility that somebody nearby owns both a Bible and a marketing department.

The Boss, meanwhile, insists the song is merely “observational,” which is generally the sort of thing he says shortly before causing minor administrative concern.

I should also point out that no actual preacher, ministry, church, television network, congregation, gospel choir, fundraising satellite uplink, miracle spring-water operation, or spiritually enhanced airport hangar was directly referenced during the making of this record.

Though several may feel seen.

As for Chip Martini, he remained behind the production desk throughout the session wearing leopard print and the expression of a chimpanzee who has absolutely heard worse business models in the entertainment industry.

If, by the end of the second verse, you feel an unexpected urge to send somebody fifty dollars and “plant a seed,” I strongly advise sitting quietly until the feeling passes.

Codsworth C. Gleason, Esq.
Assistant to the Boss,
Head of Everything Else,
Currently refusing to televise the catering budget on principle.

Discover more good music from Good Boy Records on Spotify

We appear to have moved beyond denial.

When last I filed a report on the studio situation on Gleason Street in Memphis, it was still possible, just, to treat the entire affair as a temporary lapse in judgement. A decorative fiction. A set hastily erected somewhere between the Boss’s imagination and a half-finished cup of tea. A painted frontage, a suggestive sign, a door one might reasonably expect to open onto nothing more substantial than a folding chair and a regrettable extension lead.

I regret to inform you that this is no longer a sustainable position.

The building has settled in. It has weight now, a kind of presence. One gets the distinct impression that if you were to lean against the brickwork, it would not apologise. The sign does not flicker, the door does not question itself, and inside, which is where one must lower the voice slightly, there is activity.

Chip Martini remains behind the faders, producing, and is not visiting or observing, but is installed. The Boss, who announced a “break” with the sort of breezy confidence normally reserved for men who have no intention of honouring it, has been writing at a rate that suggests the notebooks have staged a coup and are now operating independently.

What we are dealing with, in short, is not a project. It is an outbreak. Two songs have already been written and produced. That said, before we proceed with showcasing any new material, we must briefly pause and respectfully acknowledge the gentleman responsible for the spark that lit the latest particular fire.

Joseph S. Furey is a proper writer. Not a hobbyist with a platform, not a man playing at language, but a journalist in the old sense of the word, one who has been out in it, slept in it, been cold in it, and then come back with sentences that carry the weather in their bones. His piece, Asphalt Gypsy, is the sort of writing that does not raise its voice and yet leaves you with the uncomfortable sense that most of what you have previously been told on the subject has been, at best, politely inaccurate.

You can read it here:

No Forwarding Address

Asphalt Gypsy

This is a much expanded, updated piece. The original ran in The Times four years ago, when Nomadland was filling cinemas and I was living in my car. The film’s mix of documentary grit and Hollywood lyricism turned America’s rubber tramps into saints of stoic resilience. What follows is a corrective, shaped by my time on the road and the rails, a reminde…

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a month ago · 19 likes · 6 comments · Joseph S. Furey

Naturally, the Boss read this and thought, “Yes… but what if it had a bassline?”

Which is how we arrived at Dirtbagger.

Dirtbagger is the sound of the Boss encountering the idea of a man who has stepped clean outside the arrangement, the mortgages, the meetings, the polite fictions of belonging, and deciding not to analyse him but to join him for a drink. Briefly, from a safe distance, and with the engine running.

The result is a track that shrugs at consequence, grins at convention, and treats identity as something one can simply step out of, like a jacket that never quite fitted in the first place. There is no pleading here and no justification, only a quiet, rolling certainty. They have a word for people like him, and he seems perfectly content with it.

Now, it would also be remiss not to extend the same courtesy in another direction. While Dirtbagger may be the present concern, it was not the first sign of movement. That distinction belongs to Roll ’Em Out Slow, which slipped out a few days ago with the quiet assurance of a man who knows exactly how much noise he does not need to make. We return to it here for completeness, and because, having acknowledged Mr. Furey’s contribution to the current disturbance, it seems only proper to offer a similar nod to IChristopher, whose work about driving a tow truck provided the initial, earlier spark.

IChristopher is a younger voice, sharper at the edges, and inclined to drop the occasional line that stops you mid-sip and makes you reconsider your position on several matters at once. He is the sort of writer one reads for the pleasure of being slightly wrong-footed.

A small note of caution, delivered in the spirit of public service. The prose does not always trouble itself with polite society, so if you are of a delicate disposition, you may wish to loosen your collar before proceeding.

He remains, in the eyes of the Boss, far preferable to the increasingly fashionable spectacle of watching a “literary figure” consume a cheese sandwich on camera while discussing the future of narrative form.

His piece can be found here:

lchristopher

tow man. repo man. driving truck. wildcatting. felony flats free-for-all. methamphetamine toy city; rose city; rose city stompers, rose madder. in a town like twin peaks no one is innocent. dopplegang

~author photo at the light; SE Belmont/SE 34th Street cross, headed to the 405/I-5 exit…

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2 months ago · 86 likes · 39 comments · lchristopher

Roll ’Em Out Slow is, if such a thing can be said without inviting legal scrutiny, a tow-man’s hymn, all soft footfalls and low lights, a job well done while the rest of the world sleeps and pretends it will still own things in the morning.

While Roll ’Em Out Slow announced the tone, between them, these two pieces have achieved something that is vanishingly rare on Substack. They have not merely entertained the Boss, nor even mildly provoked him, but have set off what can only be described as a small but determined chain reaction.

It is not often that one encounters two superb writers in such close succession who can interrupt the usual drift of tea, notes, and vague intention, and replace it with something altogether more urgent, namely the sudden and inconvenient need to turn ideas into songs.

This is, I should stress, highly irregular. A single good piece of writing may lead to a thoughtful nod, perhaps the opening of a notebook, and occasionally even a line or two scribbled down with the air of a man who may or may not return to it later. Two, in short order, both carrying sufficient weight to send the Boss not only back to the desk but into the studio, real or otherwise, with purpose, is quite another matter entirely.

What concerns me, purely from an administrative perspective, is how easily all of this has taken hold. A so-called break, a handful of writers encountered out in the wilds of Subtack’s Notes, and a studio that may or may not exist in a city we have definitely not visited, and suddenly we have a pair of songs that sound as though they have been waiting patiently for their moment, like regulars at a bar that has not officially opened yet.

While there is no actual plan, there is, however, momentum.

Chip shows no sign of relinquishing control of the desk, and the Boss has already begun another piece of songwriting work, which I am assured will be “completely different,” a phrase which historically means only that it will be equally committed to its own logic and entirely resistant to interference.

Meanwhile, I have made preliminary enquiries regarding catering, though it is difficult to secure a supplier for a location that exists primarily as a matter of conviction. Nevertheless, I shall persevere. Standards must be maintained, especially under these conditions.

If you find yourself in the vicinity of Gleason Street, and I appreciate that this may require a certain flexibility of interpretation, you may wish to listen carefully before approaching the door. If you hear something loose, low, and entirely unconcerned with your expectations, you are in the right place.

Proceed with caution, or do not. It would appear not to matter.

Codsworth C. Gleason Esq.
Assistant to the Boss,
Head of Everything Else,
Currently attempting to expense a theory. Badly.

Discover Our Music on Spotify - Nobody Else Has

There are albums that arrive like polite correspondence, slip quietly onto the shelf, and wait to be appreciated by the sort of person who alphabetises their records and owns more than one cardigan.

This is not one of those albums.

Nothing Left to Say did not so much arrive as take over the premises. What began as a guest appearance has since reorganised the furniture, dimmed the lights, and is now holding court in the corner with a story that has, quite frankly, improved with every telling.

We did, briefly, attempt to describe this as a “release schedule.”

That lasted approximately ten minutes.

What actually happened is that the Boss sat down to write a record about the city -generational life, pressure, the quiet arithmetic of staying put while everything around you drifts off to somewhere with better parking - and somewhere along the way the thing stopped being an idea and started answering back in complete sentences.

Which is always when one pours another glass of sherry.

This one is different. Not because it behaved better - it didn’t - but because, somewhere along the line, it stopped being a collection of songs and became a place you can actually sit in.

It begins, as promised, in the city. Not a specific one, but the city. The one where families used to stay put for generations and now… don’t. The one where you can still find the occasional third-generation local clinging on like a well-dressed myth, quietly wondering when everyone else decided to make a run for it.

From there, it moves exactly as life does when it’s not being curated for polite company. Pressure first. Always pressure. The day already underway, the system already in motion, and you stepping into it with whatever dignity you managed to iron the night before.

There are real-life moments here. Small ones. The sort that don’t make headlines but do leave a mark.

A card declines in Lidl, and suddenly, you are conducting a far more philosophical afternoon than originally budgeted for.

A phone rings during the writing process to deliver sad news, and the entire tone of the record shifts, whether you feel ready for that sort of thing or not.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, the Boss realises he has wandered into his own album, looks around, considers leaving, and instead decides to stay and see how bad it gets.

We applauded this. Quietly. From a safe distance.

Now, here is where things could have gone spectacularly wrong.

Because material of this nature, left unattended, develops a taste for seriousness. It becomes meaningful. Worthy. The sort of thing one explains at length while refilling a glass that has, by now, stopped helping.

We did flirt with that.

It was ghastly.

Fortunately, at some point - and one suspects this coincided with the arrival of actual sunlight and a general loss of patience - the Boss appears to have looked the entire enterprise in the eye and said, with admirable clarity, “oh, do shut up,” before opening a window and letting the outside world have a say.

And there it is.

The mid-album turn.

The same city, the same people, the same rhythm, but now there’s air in it. Light. Warmth. The faintly irritating realisation that, for all its faults, the place is still alive and has every intention of carrying on without your permission.

Which, after a while, begins to feel less like a problem and more like a relief.

By the time we reach the end, the record has stopped trying to prove anything at all, which, in this establishment, is considered a major personal breakthrough and something we shall be dining out on for weeks.

No speeches. No moral carefully folded and presented with garnish.

Just a man, a city, and the quiet understanding that this is how it goes, has always gone, and will continue to go, whether you stand there analysing it or not.

Now, ordinarily, this is where one would summarise, thank a number of people one has forgotten to call, and insist that everything proceeded according to a plan that definitely existed.

We will not be doing that.

Partly because the Boss is already eyeing the next idea with the sort of restless energy that suggests this calm is temporary at best, and partly because this particular record does not want explaining. It wants company. Preferably all the way through.

It wants you to sit with it and see what you recognise.

You will probably recognise more than you think.

Codsworth C. Gleason, Esq.
Assistant to the Boss,
Head of Everything Else,
Currently maintaining that this was a tightly controlled artistic exercise.

Discover Our Music on Spotify

Some records arrive with a plan, a budget, and a laminated sense of purpose. This is not one of those records.

No Band Required appeared in October 2025, as far as anyone in the building can tell, somewhere between a half-finished idea and a fully stocked bar. The Boss had been circling the drain of “I might write something later” for years, and then one day, without warning, decided to stop talking about it and start doing it. What followed was less a recording process and more a series of small, escalating incidents.

The brief, if one can call it that, was disarmingly simple. Real songs. No actual band, because it’s really all done with mirrors. The clue is in the album title.

The opening cut sets the tone rather efficiently. There’s blood on the keys, the room is sweating, and nobody seems particularly interested in tidying up. It is loud, alive, and entirely unconcerned with modern notions of polish. The organ leads, the guitar answers, the horns bark, and the whole thing moves forward like it has somewhere better to be. You either step into it, or you don’t. Most people, sensibly, step in.

From there, the record refuses to sit still. One minute you are in a bar that should probably not pass inspection, with brisket, theology, and poor decision-making all being served in equal measure. The next, you are out on the road with a man who has absolutely no intention of slowing down, despite all available evidence suggesting that he probably should. There are confessions, near-misses, bad habits, and the occasional moment of grace, all delivered with the sort of voice that sounds like it’s lived through most of it already.

And then, just as you begin to think you have the measure of it, the record softens. It remembers things. It looks back. It admits, quietly and without fuss, that not everything landed the way it was meant to. There is gospel in there, not as decoration but as a kind of backbone, holding the whole thing upright when it threatens to lean too far in any one direction.

What makes it work, and it does work, is that none of this feels assembled. It feels found. The sounds bleed into each other, the edges are left where they are, and the performances carry the weight. There is no sense of anyone asking whether this is a good idea. There is only the sense that it is happening, and that it would be unwise to interrupt.

By the time it finishes, you are left with the distinct impression that something has begun rather than ended. Not a statement, not a manifesto, just a door that has been opened and, crucially, left that way.

One suspects the Boss will walk through it again. Repeatedly. Possibly at odd hours. Possibly with company.

And frankly, it would be a mistake to stop him.

Codsworth C. Gleason Esq.
Assistant to the Boss,
Head of Everything Else,
Currently checking the rider for damages.

We appear to have a studio on Gleason Street in Memphis, which is interesting, because no relocation was discussed, no travel was undertaken, and at no point did anyone think to inform me that we had, in any meaningful sense, left the building. And yet here we are. The sign is up, the door is open, and the Boss has already produced a perfectly respectable exterior image, as though one might simply will a premises into existence with sufficient enthusiasm and a steady hand.

Inside, matters have escalated. Chip Martini is behind the faders, not visiting, not assisting, but installed - adjusting levels with the quiet authority of someone who has no intention of explaining himself.

This is, I should clarify, significant.

Chip does not “sit in” on projects. He does not drift through sessions offering encouragement. When Chip is behind the faders, a decision has been made, whether consciously or not, that we are now making a new Chip Martini record. Not a collection of ideas, not a brief experiment, but a proper, fully realised body of work that will, in due course, demand ten songs and get them.

The Boss, meanwhile, is writing.

This follows several months of apparent inactivity, during which Nothing Left to Say was completed, delivered, and scheduled for release on the first of May, after which the Boss elected to “take a break,” a phrase which here appears to mean not recording anything while quietly filling notebooks with fragments, titles, and lines that have now returned all at once.

What we are seeing, therefore, is not the beginning of something, but the release of it.

This appears to have resulted in a track.

Roll ’Em Out Slow

You may wish to let it run. It settles into its own pace.

What is happening here is not, I am assured, a plan. There is no theme, no guiding narrative, no attempt to organise the material in advance. The only constraint - and it is a deliberate one - is the room itself. The instruments are fixed. Drums, bass, two guitars, keys, congas, and whatever presence the Girls choose to bring. Nothing is added simply because it can be. Everything must belong, or it does not remain.

It is, in its way, a discipline.

One might even say it is the opposite of excess, which I find reassuring, given the Boss’s known capacity for it.

I should also address the name. Dibblesound is, quite simply, for Dibble - the dog, the label mascot, and, in practical terms, the longest-serving member of the organisation. He has been here since the beginning, which is more than can be said for most of us, and has conducted himself throughout with a level of calm consistency that the rest of the operation would do well to observe.

The Boss has decided, quite reasonably, that this qualifies him for inclusion in the catalogue.

One does not argue with this.

We have, of course, seen variations of this behaviour before. There was the Buenos Aires episode, which took place largely in Rio and at one point involved a working knowledge of Spanish that appeared overnight and then vanished just as quickly. There was the Dairy Barn period, which introduced both a recording environment and a dietary focus that I am still attempting to reconcile.

Each of those, however, retained the distinct feeling of an experiment. This does not. This one feels, unmistakably, like a record.

And now we have Gleason Street.

No catering arrangements have been confirmed. No timetable has been circulated. And I have yet to receive any formal assurance that this location exists beyond the immediate requirements of the narrative. The Boss remains entirely unconcerned by these matters and has, at the time of writing, begun another song.

I shall, as ever, make the necessary arrangements.

Codsworth C. Gleason Esq.
Assistant to the Boss,
Head of Everything Else,
Currently attempting to locate a Memphis-based olive dealer.

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There comes a point, usually quite late in proceedings, where the Boss stops adjusting things.

Not because he’s satisfied, which would be far too neat, but because there is simply nothing left within reach that improves the situation. The album Nothing Left to Say has been played repeatedly, at volume, at length, and occasionally at hours best described as interpretive. Every possible objection has been raised, considered, and either resolved or quietly abandoned.

What remains is what remains.

Track Ten arrives at precisely this moment, and has the good sense not to disturb it.

Nothing Left to Say

It did not begin life in such composed circumstances. The original working title, Live a Colourful Life, emerged from a passing remark delivered with all the ceremony of a man answering a question while looking for something else. Where do the ideas come from? A colourful life, apparently.

A line like that, once spoken, rarely travels alone.

Within a very short time it had acquired a chorus, a direction, and the faint outline of a public statement. There was, briefly, the suggestion of a message being delivered. A nudge in the ribs to those attempting to write their way into experience rather than the other way round.

This phase did not last.

Left to its own devices, the song altered course. The outward gesture softened, the tone shifted, and the thing settled into something less concerned with instruction and more interested in what might actually be worth leaving behind. No announcements, no insistence. Just a line, placed carefully, and left there.

The change of title followed naturally. Nothing Left to Say is not so much a conclusion, but a recognition.

The track behaves accordingly. It does not attempt to gather the album up and present it back to the listener in a tidy bundle. It continues instead. The groove holds its ground, the band finds a comfortable arrangement with itself, and the voices move through it without urgency. There is a sense, not unwelcome, that it could carry on indefinitely without inconvenience to anyone involved.

A perfectly reasonable outcome.

The latter part of this record has been edging in this direction for some time. The air has cleared, the windows have opened, and the earlier impulse to resolve everything before breakfast has been set aside in favour of something altogether more sustainable.

It is enough that the thing exists.

There was a passing suggestion, from a usually reliable source, that proceedings had begun to resemble a form of life coaching. This is, happily, not the case. Any resemblance to guidance is incidental, and should not be taken home and applied without supervision.

What is left is a record that begins under pressure, finds its feet, and eventually stops trying to explain itself.

Which is, in its way, the most convincing argument it could have made.

The album arrives on May 1st and will make itself available in all the usual places. It will do what it does, with or without encouragement.

Elsewhere, movement has already resumed.

And here, quite properly, it stops.

Return to track one here.

Codsworth C. Gleason Esq.
Assistant to the Boss,
Head of Everything Else,
The Boss has finished the album, poured something cold, and declared the matter closed. If you’ve come this far, you may as well have an olive.

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There are, broadly speaking, two versions of the Boss available during the making of a record. One is purposeful, composed, and entirely convinced that he is guiding proceedings with the quiet authority of a man who has already seen how it ends. The other wanders from room to room in a state of philosophical inquiry, pausing at windows, reconsidering kettles, and issuing the occasional low verdict on existence as a whole.

We have, until quite recently, been entertaining the latter.

This particular stretch of the new album, Nothing Left to Say, while entirely justified on artistic grounds, developed a certain… density. Perfectly respectable, of course, but one cannot indefinitely sustain that level of reflection without the atmosphere becoming a touch upholstered. Even the dog, normally a creature of patience and low expectation, began to suggest, through posture alone, that perhaps a little sunlight might not go amiss.

Which is where Track Nine makes its entrance, with rather better timing than anyone had any right to expect.

Only the People Change

Now, a title of this nature might easily arrive carrying a briefcase full of conclusions and a tone best described as instructive. Mercifully, the song itself declines all such obligations. It steps outside instead; takes the air; observes, with a certain calm intelligence, that the city has not paused for our deliberations, nor shown the slightest inclination to do so.

And, in a development we are pleased to record for posterity, neither has the Boss.

The windows are open. The room has altered. Somewhere, a radio is making a case for itself. The street continues in that gloriously indifferent fashion it has always favoured, full of motion, interruption, and the small negotiations of daily life. Faces pass through familiar spaces, each carrying their own quiet arithmetic, and for once, the temptation to intervene, interpret, or improve matters has been set gently to one side.

We consider this a landmark decision.

The track moves accordingly, with a confidence that does not require display. There is warmth in it, and a sense of forward motion that feels less like effort and more like agreement. It does not explain itself; it simply continues, which is, after all, what the city has been doing all along.

And then, quite without ceremony, it lifts.

Not extravagantly, not with any vulgar declaration of intent, but just enough to catch the listener unprepared. A moment opens, expands, and carries everything with it; the sort of moment that arrives unannounced and leaves one slightly rearranged.

The Boss has, on several occasions, encountered this passage with what he describes as “perfect composure,” a claim which is undermined somewhat by the immediate and repeated reapplication of the track at a volume suggesting civic announcement.

We have chosen, out of kindness, not to pursue the matter.

Placed here, it does precisely what is required. The record, having spent some time in thoughtful company, remembers that life continues regardless of whether one has reached a satisfactory conclusion about it. The weight shifts. The air clears. One is, almost despite oneself, back among it.

The city, as ever, remains unmoved. The people, less so. Which is, in its way, both the problem and the solution.

Track Nine.

The sun is out, the windows are open, and the Boss has, for the moment, abandoned all attempts to reorganise the world before breakfast.

One cannot ask for more than that.

Track ten can be found here.

Codsworth C. Gleason Esq.
Assistant to the Boss,
Head of Everything Else,
Currently of the view that if this agreeable state of affairs can be maintained for even another track, we may yet declare the entire enterprise a qualified success, pending refreshments.

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There are songs one writes, records, releases, and files away with a certain professional dignity.

And then there are songs like this, which follow the Boss around for twenty years like a slightly disappointed relative who refuses to leave the wedding.

“Not the Lonely Ones” first appeared during his Magic Ship years, sometime in the early 2000s, when the Boss was still operating under the charming illusion that bands exist to faithfully execute his ideas rather than quietly look at one another and suggest a different chorus.

It was demoed on a four-track cassette at the kitchen table, presented with confidence, and set aside with the sort of polite uncertainty usually reserved for dishes nobody ordered.

A rock song, apparently. Though one with the inconvenient habit of feeling something.

This did not help.

The song also survived the Blogger era, which frankly puts it in a very small and rather distinguished club. Back when tracks were embedded via DivShare and everyone assumed the internet would behave like a well-run archive rather than a lightly organised bonfire. When that particular system gave up the ghost and took a fair portion of early material with it, this one, for reasons best known to itself, remained.

It lingered. Turned up in the odd solo set during a brief and largely uncelebrated attempt at being a solo artist, a role the Boss abandoned upon realising he preferred noise, collaboration, and someone else to blame when things went sideways. Then it disappeared again.

Fast forward a long chalk.

During the Memphis Gospel Got Soul sessions, at the exact point the Boss had discovered Hammond organs, backing singers, and the general thrill of sounding like a late-night studio in 1969, the song resurfaced.

And, rather annoyingly, it worked.

Not as a rock number. That had been tried, debated, and quietly abandoned years earlier. But as a full Southern Soul piece. Hammond, claps, call-and-response. The lot. For a brief moment, it looked as though it had finally found its home.

The difficulty was classification.

Because while it sounded like it belonged, it wasn’t actually of the same piece. It leaned differently. Carried a different kind of weight. It sat slightly off to one side of what the Memphis Gospel Got Soul record was trying to do.

So it was pulled back out, dusted off, and redirected toward No Band Required, where a quieter, more restrained arrangement ultimately made the final cut.

That is the version that sits on the album.

Not the Lonely Ones - No Band Required album version.

It does precisely what it needs to do there. It gives the record space. A moment of breath between larger statements. No fuss, no grandstanding, just quietly getting the job done.

The interesting part is that the original lyric had been pointing in this direction all along.

“I didn’t believe a single word that you told me” is not the opening of a triumphant rock anthem. Nor does “we’re not the only ones… by a long chalk” suggest a man about to climb onto a monitor and declare victory. It is, at heart, a confession. It simply took the better part of two decades to admit it.

By that point, of course, there was another version sitting quietly to one side. The one that nearly made it onto No Band Required. The revival take.

This is the same song with the dial turned firmly the other way. Bigger, looser, leaning into the call-and-response, allowing the band to stretch and the backing singers to do what they were clearly born to do. It is the version that announces itself without hesitation.

Which is precisely why it was left off.

Not because it didn’t work. Quite the opposite. It worked so well it risked pulling focus, tipping the balance, turning a measured record into something far less disciplined.

So it stayed on the bench.

A strong option. Just not the right one on the day.

And now, with no album structure to protect and no questions of fit to worry about, it can be heard exactly as it is. The other path. The version that nearly was. The sound of a song finally being allowed to stretch its legs without knocking over the furniture. Which, given its history, feels only fair.

Not the Lonely Ones - Revival Version

There is, it must be said, a slight sense of hindsight creeping in at this point.

Listening back now, with the benefit of distance and a properly functioning pair of ears, one could make a fairly robust case that this version might have had every right to appear on Memphis Gospel Got Soul. It has the weight, the lift, the sheer conviction of the thing. It does not so much ask for attention as assume it will be given.

At the time, however, matters were less straightforward.

The softer arrangement had already found its place on No Band Required, doing exactly what that record needed it to do. Once that decision was made, the song was, for all practical purposes, spoken for. One does not generally release two competing versions of the same track across two different albums without inviting a level of confusion that even this operation prefers to avoid.

There was also the small matter of tone. This is, beneath the arrangement, a deeply personal song. The revival version, for all its undeniable power, carries that weight in a very public way. At the time, the Boss took the view that it did not quite belong in that setting. Whether that was judgement or caution is, in retrospect, open to debate.

What is not in doubt is this. It is, as the Boss has since observed with some force, a rather good version.

One might even go so far as to say it was briefly left on the bench when it was more than capable of starting.

Still, these are the decisions that shape records. Right or wrong, they give the catalogue its character. And occasionally, if one is fortunate, they leave something behind worth rediscovering, which is, after all, how we ended up here.

Curious - which one would you have put on the record?

Codsworth C. Gleason, Esq.
Assistant to the Boss,
Head of Everything Else,
Currently keeping a close eye on the archives in case anything else decides to reappear twenty years late with improved manners and a better arrangement.

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There are, from time to time, moments in the Boss’s life where a perfectly ordinary sentence is spoken aloud and, in the same instant, becomes a contractual obligation of catastrophic proportions.

“I’ve never written you a love song,” he says, casually, over tea, biscuits, and what I can only assume was a complete absence of foresight. “I’ll do one for our anniversary.”

Three weeks later, we were knee-deep in thirty verses, several emotional detours, and what can only be described as a full-scale lyrical incident.

Now, I should make something very clear at this point. The Boss does not do “schmaltz.” He will circle it, glare at it, occasionally poke it with a stick, but he will not, under any circumstances, embrace it. Which presents a slight logistical challenge when one is, technically speaking, attempting to write a love song.

So instead of flowers and violins, what we get is something far more dangerous. We get the truth, filtered through years of shared nonsense, private language, and the sort of in-jokes that would sound utterly ridiculous to anyone not directly involved.

Enter, if you will, Lipsy and Dipstick.

I am given to understand these names originate from a period involving cartoons, youthful charm, and what appears to be a mutual agreement that life, at its core, is faintly absurd and best handled as such. Lipsy, for reasons that require no further explanation. Dipstick, for reasons that absolutely do.

They are not pet names in the conventional sense. They are, rather, a system. A working philosophy. A way of looking at the world and saying, “Well… that’s gone a bit Lipsy and Dipstick, hasn’t it,” and carrying on regardless.

And once you understand that, the song makes perfect sense.

Or rather, it refuses to make sense in the correct way.

Because this is not a love song about grand gestures or sweeping history. The Boss wisely abandoned that somewhere around verse seventeen. This is a love song about two people who have outlived the chaos, outlasted the noise, and now find themselves on the other side of it, still slightly baffled, still amused, and still very much in it together.

You hear it in the details. The postcard from Spain. The old flat that somehow becomes “gold” in retrospect. Cats in the sun. Record players, candles, joss sticks, hallway golf, and an usherette light show that I strongly suspect violated several local regulations.

None of it is framed as important. Which is precisely why it is.

Then, of course, we arrive at the small matter of Norfolk.

I will not dwell on the linguistic gymnastics required to arrive at “Norfolk ’n’ good,” except to say that the Boss has committed to it with the sort of confidence normally reserved for people who have decided to simply run through the wall and see what happens on the other side.

It should not work.

It does.

Because by the time you get there, you’re already inside the world. You’ve accepted the terms. You understand that this is how these two people talk, think, and navigate everything from seaside postcards to the long, slow plan of getting out of the city and into something quieter.

And then, just when you think the matter is settled, the Boss does what the Boss always does.

He makes four versions.

Four.

Each one, I am told, representing a different musical angle, a different mood, a different attempt to land the thing without accidentally turning into a greeting card. What begins as a thoughtful gesture quietly evolves into a contingency plan of alarming proportions.

And when the moment comes, and the song is presented, the outcome is both inevitable and entirely on brand.

He picks one.

She prefers another.

The version he loves the most does not even make the album.

Naturally.

Which brings us, quite neatly, to this one.

The chilled version. The late-night version. The one that sounds like it was recorded sometime after midnight with a glass in hand and the room finally still. No grand arrangement, no crowd, no performance. Just a voice, a guitar, and the feeling that nobody is trying to prove anything anymore.

Lipsy and Dipstick Ride Tonight

It sits there, quietly, doing exactly what it was supposed to do all along.

Not impress.

Not declare.

Just be.

And somewhere in the middle of it, if you listen closely enough, you can hear the whole thing for what it really is.

Not a love song.

A life, distilled down to something you can hum.

Norfolk ’n’ good, indeed.

Codsworth C. Gleason, Esq.
Assistant to the Boss,
Head of Everything Else,
Still waiting to see which version gets played in the kitchen, which, I suspect, is the only chart that actually matters.

There comes a point, usually somewhere around the second or third sherry, when the Boss begins to circle the room in that particular way, the one that suggests a thought has taken hold and is refusing to let go. It starts quietly enough, a glance at the news, a passing remark about the state of things, and then, before one can intervene with breakfast or distraction, we are off.

The question he is asking here is not especially complicated, though it is delivered with increasing emphasis each time. How, exactly, have we managed to arrive at a stage of civilisation where everything appears to be… working, technically… and yet somehow also on the verge of falling over?

One does not engage in politics, of course. One finds it terribly bad for the constitution and quite incompatible with a peaceful morning routine. And yet, in the course of attending to the Boss and his various creative episodes, one cannot help but absorb the general thrust of his observations, which, it must be said, have taken on a certain persistence.

For decades now, he notes, we have all been dutifully turning up, casting our votes for change, for improvement, for transformation, for the next set of individuals who assure us, with great confidence, that this time things will be handled properly. It is, on the surface, a very reasonable system, full of promise and good intention.

And yet, and this is where the pacing begins, nobody ever seems to stay long enough to fix anything.

The speeches come and go, the arguments grow louder, the colours become more vivid, and all the while the basic business of keeping things in working order appears to drift quietly down the list of priorities. The roads begin to suffer, the services begin to slip, the general feel of a place, once solid and dependable, takes on that faintly neglected quality, as though someone, somewhere, has decided that maintenance is no longer terribly fashionable.

At which point, the Boss tends to stop, look directly at no one in particular, and ask a question that is, I must admit, rather difficult to ignore.

How is it, he wonders, that one can elect an apparently ordinary individual, send them off to manage affairs for a few years, and then watch them return considerably wealthier than when they left, while everything else seems to have become slightly worse and significantly more expensive? It is a curious transformation, repeated often enough that it has begun to attract attention, particularly from those still waiting for the promised improvements to materialise.

Meanwhile, the debts accumulate, the systems creak, and the bill, with impeccable manners, positions itself neatly in the future for the next generation to deal with. The Boss, who has been observing this pattern for rather longer than he cares to admit, has developed a certain scepticism as to whether this is entirely accidental.

Which brings us, quite neatly, to the song in question, track number eight from the forthcoming album Nothing Left to Say, which will be available from May 1st.

Everybody’s Got a Part to Play

Because this was not, as I understand it, intended to be a political piece. The record itself has been moving in its own direction, shifting from those earlier, darker moods into something with a little more light, a little more lift, a sense that the second half might allow itself to breathe. And yet, somewhere along the way, this particular track arrived and insisted on being included.

Not as a speech, not as a complaint, but as an observation.

The genius of it, if one may say so without causing embarrassment at the breakfast table, is that it refuses to point outward. There is no grand accusation, no convenient villain, just a rather inconvenient admission that each generation, in its enthusiasm, has a tendency to leave things slightly more complicated than it found them.

“Left you something to reverse.”

It is a line the Boss seems particularly pleased with, though he has not said so directly. One notices these things.

And from there, the song does something rather clever. It does not linger. It does not wallow. It simply hands the matter on, as though passing a glass across the table.

Now it is your turn.

Which, when set against the current state of things, carries a certain weight. Because if the pattern continues, if people remain more interested in the performance of disagreement than in the practical business of making things function, then nothing changes. The noise increases, certainly, but the roads remain broken, the systems remain strained, and the sense of slow decline continues its quiet work in the background.

The Boss, in one of his calmer moments, suggested that perhaps the answer is not to shout louder, but to pay closer attention to the things that actually matter day to day. To meet, as he put it, over the garden fence, rather than hurling opinions across it. It was, I felt, an optimistic thought, though I did not interrupt.

And so we arrive at the hook, which, after all this, sounds less like a lyric and more like a gentle, unavoidable truth.

Everybody has a part to play.

Not a glamorous part, one suspects, and certainly not one that comes with immediate reward, but a necessary one all the same. The sort of role that involves less shouting and rather more doing, which may explain its current lack of popularity.

Still, the track sits exactly where it should, lifting the second half of the record, setting up what follows, and quietly expanding the scope of the whole affair without ever breaking its stride. One might even say it gives the album a certain… perspective.

Though I shall not say that aloud.

The Boss would only start pacing again.

Track nine can be found here.

Codsworth C. Gleason Esq.
Assistant to the Boss,
Head of Everything Else,
Currently considering whether the collapse of civilisation might, in fact, be delayed until after luncheon, which would be far more convenient for all concerned.

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There is, at present, a great deal of noise surrounding the idea that the future will be delivered to your front door in the form of a robot.

Not the terrifying sort, mind you. Those appear to be coming along quite nicely. The military ones move with purpose. The industrial ones lift things, stack things, and generally behave as though they have been designed by people who intend them to work.

No, the focus here is domestic.

The helpful kind. The sort that will fold your laundry, cook your dinner, and stand quietly in the corner awaiting instruction like a well-brought-up butler with a software update. One sees the demonstrations. Eggs are handled. Towels are lifted. There is a great deal of careful, deliberate movement accompanied by an even greater amount of confident commentary.

And one cannot help but feel… unconvinced.

Because the reality, as the Boss identified with admirable speed and a complete lack of restraint, is that these things will arrive, be ruinously expensive, and be almost entirely useless. Beautifully presented, endlessly discussed, and fundamentally incapable of doing the one thing you bought them for.

In practical terms, they will amount to this.

An extremely expensive fag lighter for rich people.

That is to say, a machine of considerable cost and ambition whose single reliable function is to produce a small flame with a degree of theatrical flourish.

Everything else, one suspects, will be commentary.

It was at this point that the Boss, rather than quietly noting the observation and getting on with his life, decided to build an entire retro-futurist entertainment system around it.

A world of smiling appliances, persuasive voices, and products that promised ease while quietly delivering process, commentary, and a growing sense that one had made a terrible mistake. At its centre, or at least at the precise moment the whole thing began to buckle under its own ambition, stood Percy.

On paper, he was a ButlerBot. A domestic assistant. A companion device designed to “curate your environment” and “optimise your lived experience,” which we are assured meant something to someone at the time.

In the song, it is Edwin’s wife, Gilda, who insists they get one because the neighbours have one. And so, naturally, one must follow suit.

Percy Promotional Advertisment

Yes.

Quite.

One cannot accuse the man of lacking confidence. The delivery is immaculate. The brass section is fully committed. Somewhere, one imagines, Mr. Greene is nodding along as though civilisation itself has just taken a meaningful step forward.

“Your Personalised Environmental Resource Curator for You.”

We have elected not to dwell on that.

What Percy actually does, once installed, is far more interesting.

He observes.

He evaluates.

He comments.

He compliments radiators, schedules joy, cancels breakfast, and delivers a steady stream of entirely unsolicited insight into your emotional condition. He does not cook. He does not clean. He does not, under any reasonable interpretation of the brief, assist.

He is, in every meaningful sense, the product.

A beautifully realised piece of consumer theatre. A machine that knows your pulse, your posture, and your inner life, but remains fundamentally baffled by curtains and openly suspicious of heat.

Which, as it happens, brings us neatly to the actual song.

Percy

And here, the Boss runs into the limits of his own joke.

Because what this track does, very well it must be said, is land the central idea with precision. A man buys the future. The future explains him back to himself. The problem remains.

Percy tracks everything.

Except the thing that matters.

It is sharp. It is controlled. The big band arrangement plays it straight, which is exactly the right call. No winking, no exaggeration, just a polished, showbiz confidence wrapped around something that is quietly, persistently useless.

Which is precisely why it works.

It is also, unfortunately, why it could not continue.

Because once you have established that the future is a room full of polite machines doing absolutely nothing of value, the next step begins to look suspiciously like the last. Electric vehicles were, briefly, considered. Percy himself was almost handed the keys, a prospect we are relieved did not progress beyond early drafts given his already documented relationship with basic function.

But the problem had already presented itself.

Same meat.

Different gravy.

And even the Boss, several evenings into the exercise and still very much enjoying himself, recognised that an entire album of increasingly elaborate ways of not solving a problem might test the patience of even the most committed listener.

At which point, to his credit, he stopped. Not dramatically. Not with regret. Simply with the quiet understanding that the point had been made, and made rather well.

There is, however, one detail that ensures Percy’s continued presence in the archive.

He lights your fags.

Perfectly.

No commentary. No analysis. No attempt to improve your life or optimise your choices. Just a small, efficient spark delivered exactly when required, with none of the surrounding nonsense.

Which, in the circumstances, places him comfortably ahead of expectations.

So we leave him here.

A product that never quite made it. A system that went just far enough. And a rather elegant demonstration that the future, when it arrives, may well be beautifully designed, confidently delivered, and entirely useless.

Codsworth C. Gleason Esq.,
Assistant to the Boss,
Head of Everything Else,
Still waiting for when anything to do with the future becomes genuinely useful.

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