‘Papers’ is one of a few a songs I wrote a few years ago reflecting on memory and regret. The ‘papers’ of the title are ambiguous. The song is short and direct, a bit like a newspaper byline suggesting perhaps we learn from history, the mistakes of others. Or perhaps they allude to legal papers such as a marriage contract evoking looking back over an ended relationship. As an artist who’s long worked primarily on paper, in drawing and painting, there’s a sense of looking back over old work too, that feeling that it was someone else who made these things, of trying to reconnect with a past self.
The video for the song is built around a clip of my young son blowing out the candles of his 5th birthday cake, some 10 years ago as I write. I’ve made very rudimentary animations of the candles and the cake using very basic, open source software, echoing the early computer design programs I first tried out in the 1990s. I like the idea of this unrefined, clunky video being released into the HD, AI driven world of Avatars and NFTs, offering a reflective, if somewhat ironic, moment of pause for reflection and nostalgia. And of course the song, birthday cards, the photographs of the birthday party, none of these exist on paper as they would have in previous generations. So perhaps ultimately this is a love-song to the real, physical world:
Please don’t throw out the papers
Remember yesterday
It’s not that far away
It’s not that for away
You can’t forget
All those mistakes
