August 23, 2024 • 78 mins
In this episode, W sits down with the talented and kind hearted Oli Steadman from the band Stornoway to discuss life as a musician, the band's journey, and the profound impact of music on both personal and collective levels.
W kicks off the conversation with a heartwarming backstory about using music to bring students together in his classroom, specifically through Stornoway's song "We Are the Battery Human." This leads to a discussion about the band's message of reconnecting with nature and stepping away from technology for well-being.
The episode delves into Oli's childhood experiences in South Africa (, his progressive education ("kids were all wacky and overstimulated b/c of busy, creative parents"), and the cultural impact of learning Zulu("history and culture"). Oli shares poignant memories of moving to the UK ("never got to say goodbye") and the challenges he faced, including the role of music in overcoming solitude. The conversation also touches on the powerful influence of Nelson Mandela ("one of a kind person, so special, genuine role model") and the inspiration drawn from his life.
We explore the concept of "friendtorships"—mentorships that also encompass deep friendships. Oli reflects on key figures in his life who have helped him grow, both personally and professionally, including his former bosses Jim Reynolds ("welcomed me to my first job...Jim had the most brutal and helpful, 1:1 chat w/ me") and Dean Curtis ("the kind of boss that everyone deserves to have"). The discussion emphasizes the importance of genuine connections and the role of technology in modern friendships.
As we transition to talk about Stornoway's work, their last performance, the focus shifts to their 2023 album "Dig the Mountain" and the song "Trouble with the Green."(so many interpretations, it deals with stress, technically a description of the symptoms") Oli provides insights into the band's creative process, the challenges of lyric writing, and the evolution of their harmonious sound. The episode wraps up with a fun lightning round, giving listeners a glimpse into Oli's preferences and personality.
Don't miss this enlightening conversation filled with personal anecdotes, musical insights, and the essence of what makes Oli such a unique and creative person. His words will draw you in, hook, line, and sinker! Follow Oli Steadman: https://www.stornowayband.com/ https://www.instagram.com/olikizuki/
Follow H.I. Art on the Edge: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and X
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Music.
(00:16):
Hello, everyone. This is W, host of the High Art on the Edge page, host of Surprise Cast.
I'm so excited because we have a wonderful guest here in Surprise Cast land
who's going to talk about life as a musician in a band that I've quite admired over the years.
(00:39):
In fact, I'm going to start our conversation with a little backstory.
I was a fifth grade teacher back in the Bay Area for 23 years.
I used to incorporate quite a bit of music in my classroom.
Every day my students would sing, we would dance, and it was really this notion of bringing my class,
(01:04):
my students together in a way that pushed and
encouraged them to step out of their comfort zone well one
day I decided to throw a storm way out at their ears and that was of course
beachcombers windowsill and there was a song in there that I decided you know
(01:25):
what I think this is a song they're gonna gravitate towards and that was we
We are the battery humans.
Well, on Spotify, you can have the lyrics scrolling. And so I had a huge screen in my classroom.
So I'd bring all the students up. I'd separate the boys from the girls.
And it took about two or three plays.
(01:48):
And the next day I played it and I just called the boys up. I said,
boys, time for you to sing this song.
It's as if I was handing them candy. I
don't know what happened but they could not wait to sing that song and I think
not that they could hit some of those harmonic high notes because they're only
(02:10):
in fifth grade but that song really resonated with the boys and it really bonded them.
Felt as if they were like kind of the old school throwback singers.
Maybe a little bit of the Smother Brothers or Clancy Brothers.
And just kind of coming together based on this song.
(02:32):
Needless to say, at the end of the year, we performed many songs for the parents.
But in particular, the boys sang that song a cappella.
And it was spine tingling. Because they took it seriously.
They honor the band and they honor the song.
So that's kind of a backstory into this band.
(02:56):
And so I want to welcome Oli Stedman from the band Stornoway. How are you?
Thanks, William. I'm doing really well. Thanks. And it's great to be here. I love that story.
And that is one of my favorite songs in our repertoire.
It's also the one that I think most directly captures the message of Stornoway,
(03:17):
which is all about reconnecting with nature getting outside getting away from technology.
And rebalancing in the name of
well-being and connecting to something bigger outside
oneself so it's a thrill to hear that a whole class of kids connected with the
message that they felt we were telling in the song maybe they picked up a different
(03:40):
kind of message but it's the one that's most explicitly about this reconnecting
to something bigger outside yourself and and,
to nature in particular i love that message and we did talk about that because where i taught,
technology played an enormous role in the classroom and there would be days just say you know what,
(04:06):
turn off your devices please let's just talk let's just connect so we went over the lyrics,
and i pounded and pounded that message all year long so i'm glad that i was able to,
present that song to him not just a way of singing but also understanding its thematic concern,
(04:29):
which i wholeheartedly agree it is kind of the identity and spirit of your band.
Before we go launching into the band's work and your role and contributions,
I would like to retrace our steps here, Ollie, and I would want to focus on
three pillars, if you will, and that's going to be your childhood experiences,
(04:55):
friendtorships, and then the body of your work, and then we'll wrap up today's
conversation with a little bit of fun, fun time, and I'll explain that later.
So this conversation is going to be built around a book called Build the Life
You Want, The Art and Science of Getting Happier.
(05:16):
This is written by a well-known author by the name of Arthur C.
Brooks with some commentary by Oprah Winfrey.
And it talks about exactly what you just mentioned. How do we stay connected to each other?
But most importantly, how do we stay connected to ourselves in a sea of fucking
(05:42):
chaos and noise and distractions,
Twitter, all of that stuff?
So, in my hand, I have a book called Good Grief, Peanuts Pick Me Up.
Ollie, I'm going to read a little cartoon to you, and I'm going to ask you a question.
(06:02):
And I want you to think about how this may relate to your childhood experiences.
Are you familiar with the Peanuts, Charlie Brown? Yeah, I never quite figured
out the kind of role of Charlie Brown as part of Peanuts.
Was Peanuts the name of the title in the story and he was just a character?
(06:25):
And I never got to figure out the names of everyone, maybe Snoopy, but no one else.
But it's like I saw that cartoon every week in the weekly paper that I'm hanging out at home.
Home and I never quite knew what I was meant to be interpreting from it I mean
this was me as a very young kid but I am aware of it and I kind of have an affectionate
(06:45):
memory for the confusion,
that it used to bring me I just I guess I was too young to understand what it
was trying to get at my preferred cartoon of that era was maybe Calvin and Hobbes
which is very similar in fact the characters kind of look different look similar
in their proportions and I was actually so keen on Calvin and Hobbes that I
(07:06):
would go and trace those cartoons.
And I really did aspire to be a cartoonist one day.
But yeah, in terms of the age difference and the message that I picked up,
I was more of a Calvin and Hobbes fan than a Peanuts fan.
But I'm really keen to see what we get from it now in this reading.
You can't go wrong with Calvin and Hobbes.
(07:29):
Okay, so two people are sitting on a doghouse, Peppermint Patty and Snoopy.
Peppermint Patty's best friend Marcy is strolling along, and she walks up to
him and says, Now what are you doing, sir?
Peppermint Patty says, I'm not doing anything, Marcy.
I'm just going to sit here for the rest of my life with my old friend Snoopy.
(07:54):
Oh, don't do that, sir. Come down and go to school with me.
Peppermint Patty says, Nope. I'm going
to stay right here because old Snoopy
is the only one who understands me and Snoopy
says I do that's correct
(08:15):
so Ollie my question is actually simple and elaborate however you will tell
the listeners positive and or negative school experiences that you had that still,
linger in your mind?
(08:36):
I think I have had a very...
Spicy sidewinding adventure when it
comes to thinking about school i grew
up in south africa and from age
three i was in the creche which
(08:58):
is like the kindergarten for the university
where my folks worked and the
kids in the creche were all the kids of
academics so we were all kind of
wacky and overstimulated because
we had very busy creative parents from
(09:19):
there i went to a very progressive independent school in the city which was
one of the first schools to go against the apartheid laws and regulations and
so it allowed kids of color which is very important,
and more and more important as time goes by.
(09:39):
Looking back at that important opportunity
that I had, that so many of my contemporaries didn't in South Africa.
By age 15, it meant that I had learned Zulu, and Afrikaans was another language
we had to learn, but Zulu was the one I really cared about.
And later in life, I would go and form a band who sang in Zulu,
(10:01):
which was another an aspect of my education
that shouldn't have been allowed if you'd gone on like
what the state wanted us to learn but the school was progressive enough that
it they taught us zulu and zulu music and zulu culture and history as well i
also picked up fossa which is another language very similar to zulu it's one
(10:22):
of the 11 official languages of south africa very widely spoken,
and much more widely spoken than English, for instance.
At 15, everything kind of spiced up even more because I unintentionally moved to the UK.
It was going to be a one-year sabbatical for my academic dad,
but it ended up being a permanent move.
(10:45):
And I never got to say goodbye to my granny, my granddad, and my school friends.
So I guess I could pause the journey there and say that that would be the time
around which I would draw the saddest memories, the difficult memories.
And maybe if I pick one for you, it would just be that memory of arriving in
(11:08):
this school in Oxford in the UK, very academic town, kind of.
Competitive and dry would be another word to put it
like i never got out into nature anymore because
i'd moved from the drakenspoke mountains of south africa to
inner city oxford with these tiny roads
a thousand years old down which lines of traffic tried to speed every day and
(11:31):
there was pollution and formality and i remember for the first six months of
being there that i would just kind of roam the corridors of the chemistry block at lunchtimes,
not knowing who to talk to or really what to do with myself.
And I think at the time I had a kind of resilience, which meant I didn't see
(11:53):
that as solitude or anything to be sorry about.
But years later, I do see it as a sad thing because I think of all the relationships
that I could have formed or things I could have done with those tons.
But I was just like kind of a scared, lonely kid walking
through the corridors and that all ended
when my best friend Alex Badamchi
(12:15):
turned up out of the blue he was another kid who was kind of strolling around
alone at lunch times and break times and we found each other and we formed a
band and we started playing and music was the thing that then pulled me out of my teenage solitude.
The happy memory that I would contrast that with would be rewinding to the Drakensberg
(12:41):
Mountains in South Africa, where I spent maybe two full years.
I was in the boarding school, so I was five hours away from Johannesburg.
This is a second school that I didn't mention, but it was kind of the follow-on
school from the one that I did mention, and both of them taught Zulu.
So there I am in the Drakensberg Mountains, learning Zulu every day.
(13:02):
And I was so lucky.
And as time goes by, again, I realized more and more how lucky I was to go to
that school because it had all manner of South African wildlife living on the school.
You could walk out the door and encounter water buffalo, impala.
There was a herd of zebra down by the river, which was only like a half hour hike away.
(13:26):
Giraffe and warthogs, Anything that didn't eat little school kids,
they allowed to kind of breed and nurture on that estate.
So my happiest memories from school would be just, yeah, seeing the mountains
every morning and roaming around this beautiful natural world whilst studying
(13:49):
really interesting topics.
And then later, you know, moving to Oxford, all that was kind of evaporated.
There you go. The sad and the happy. the sweet and the sour thank you yeah.
You had mentioned about your parents being creative type. Is that correct?
That's right. So can you elaborate that on a little bit more?
(14:11):
Sure. I think I'd say they're creative in the way that any academic people tend to be creative.
If you focused on a specific topic or sector and you study and you have to write
creatively, even within a very tight framework.
So they didn't do creative subjects necessarily later in their careers,
(14:35):
but you have to write in such a way that you're breathing your own ideas into
a topic so that it feels fresh and new to the people who are going to read your material.
So my dad was the more creative side.
He did theater and drama.
And in South Africa in the 70s and 80s, that again was something that was very
(14:59):
affected by what the state wanted citizens to, how they wanted citizens to be.
My dad found that as a drama student in the early 70s, he was studying only white playwrights.
And it took a journey to New York, where he did his master's in theater studies.
(15:23):
It took that journey and meeting people outside of South Africa for him to realize
and be told by them, hey, there's a whole bunch of black playwrights that you
clearly don't even know about.
You need to do better and on one hand he had an excuse which is that the state was not only.
Banning the performance of any
(15:46):
of these black playwrights work but actively stopping
the export and promotion and development of
any of their talent and even black
actors weren't being allowed out to work properly so he
had that as an excuse but on the other hand he thought even though
that's the situation i could be doing better so he came back
(16:06):
from new york having completed the masters there and then
spent i guess it must 10 to 15 years developing black
playwrights locally and his phd thesis which took seven years was a deep dive
into who are the indigenous people who are writing the indigenous stories and
(16:27):
telling the real truth of the South African culture.
And why are they being silenced? Eventually in 91, that led to him.
Taking some of these plays and also his family so i got to go along with this
to the states for a whole year in 91 and we based ourselves in virginia which
(16:50):
was like a culture shock for me,
and i mean i was four at the time so i didn't really
have much i didn't feel much shock but
i i was i was thrilled to kind of see
a new place but he toured these plays these unheard
of plays around the country and they won
some awards i can't remember the names of
(17:12):
these but they were some pretty big awards and he brought
those lost hidden plays to
a global audience so that was
the kind of creative side that my dad was involved
with and he then set up courses to be taught back in South Africa to the students
(17:33):
coming into the university to ensure that they didn't have to go outside or
go outside the country to learn about their own country's culture.
So these plays were added to the syllabus.
And that's something I'm really proud of my dad for achieving.
On my mom's side, you could say
less creative because hers was all about the the
(17:55):
labor negotiations and labor
laws that affect south african industry so she
was involved in negotiating fair wages
for gold miners for instance and that's
all about like law and dispute resolution but
you have to be very creative when you're trying
(18:15):
to find solutions in alternative dispute resolution
contexts because you can't just look it
all up in a case law book and you can't just
rely on like a set of rules necessarily
you tend to have two parties who have a
disagreement that seems intractable like
they both want something that the other refuses
(18:38):
to give but at that very moment you you
the best mediators come up
with creative solutions solutions as to how someone
can get from a situation something
they didn't realize they wanted and their counterpart can
give them that thing whilst getting something they didn't realize they
wanted and everyone ends up in a win-win situation so that's.
(19:01):
The kind of yeah different kind of creativity that my mom was bringing and i've
learned and i'm continuing to learn those different kinds of creativity from
each of them i'm speaking with ollie stedman and And just learning so much in
such little time already about your experiences in South Africa.
(19:21):
I want to stay on South Africa just for a little bit longer.
I want to read something to you, and I just want to get your response to it.
This is a lyric by a very famous singer from a song that he sang that became
almost, well, I would say anthemic.
(19:43):
You can blow out a candle, but you can't blow out a fire.
Peter Gabriel, Biko.
I've never been to South Africa. I feel as though that song was a lens into
a little bit of that challenging artist experience.
(20:05):
And there have been others along the way. Eddie Grant, Give Me Hope, Joanna.
When you hear Peter Gabriel honor Stephen Biko in this song,
in the political message,
the social commentary, I do want to know, Oli, is that something that as you are as a musician,
(20:30):
do you feel that song gives a somewhat accurate representation of the social
strife that was happening during that time?
I think the strangest thing about my South African upbringing was that I was
isolated from a lot of the best music in the world,
(20:52):
because either overtly the apartheid government banned some music from coming into the country.
Famously the Beatles records were all unattainable and the story of Sugarman
or Rodriguez his music was the opposite they there was some bootleg record that
came in but you couldn't buy the real thing because no one would distribute
(21:14):
it to South Africa or so not overtly but just kind of.
Indirectly big labels and distributing companies wouldn't send their music to
South Africa So the result was,
I'd heard of the Beatles and Elton John and Pink Floyd and some of these huge
acts and Peter Gabriel in childhood, but I never heard their music until I got to the UK.
(21:39):
And so the two names you mentioned, Peter Gabriel, I've since become aware of
his catalogue and Stornoway have actually worked together.
Very closely and almost directly with him we've
recorded in his studio a couple of times and the great relationship with
his label real world real world eddie eddie grant
we don't i don't have any experience of so i
(22:01):
can't and i can't say i've i've heard either song and so
i don't know if i can comment on that but from the lyrics
that you quoted there i think those are
exactly the kinds of lyrics that chimed
well with the kind of liberation movement and
wave of people in South Africa what they wanted to see
(22:22):
through the late 70s through to the 90s when
everything eventually went democratic there was a very positive tangible wave
of political activity and emotion driving what seemed like everybody in South
Africa but obviously I lived in the kind of bubble of that progressive liberal society.
(22:44):
Even today, 30 years after democracy, there are pockets of South Africa who
want to return back to the way things were in apartheid, which is really shocking
and incomprehensible to me.
And obviously for them, those lyrics would not shine and would be anathema.
But I think for the majority of people in South Africa or watching South Africa
(23:06):
through those crucial 20, 30 years,
those kinds of songs were so important in galvanizing the protest message and
making people realize they weren't just individually disagreeing with the status quo.
There was a whole groundswell of people and the fire was getting bigger and brighter.
And eventually in 1994, the fire kind of made its feelings known and the the
(23:31):
landslide ANC success kicked in and it became a rainbow nation.
So yeah, I'm a huge fan of any of those songs, those protest songs that helped achieve that.
When you hear the words Nelson Mandela, what conjures up in your mind?
(23:53):
A one-of-a-kind person who i was very fortunate to meet i think maybe twice,
he was so special and a genuine role model like every role model and every human there are,
(24:14):
many sides to the story and i i
nowadays hear people saying oh nelson mandela wasn't you know a total angel
there were things that there were compromises he had to do to get the government
working effectively and achieve the kind of change they needed most of the detractors
(24:35):
though i hear say this are people who,
feel that he compromised too much around the 1994 unity government formation,
whereas I think that he pragmatically brought together so many different parties
and he had to do that in order to stop civil war happening.
(24:57):
But there are a lot of purists who wanted him to stick more closely to.
I don't know, like a simplistic political agenda. But he single-handedly achieved the Rainbow Nation.
And for the next, let's see, for the next 15 years, he was very active and provided
(25:22):
the kind of anchor that South Africa needed.
I think the high point of the whole Nelson Mandela story in my head is 1995.
When he turned up at the Rugby World Cup final and South Africa won the Rugby World Cup.
It was one year into its existence as a democracy, a rainbow nation,
and Mandela, who had never expressed any interest in rugby,
(25:45):
I mean, almost the opposite, he completely justifiably saw it as a colonial
relic and something belonging to the apartheid era.
But he turned up and defied expectations
and he owned that moment and then
he kind of raised the trophy with the white south
african captain andrew pinar and together they
(26:07):
they've created this image of south africa is done with the past we are a champion
nation we can achieve the unexpected and yeah that's the image that encapsulates
nelson mandela for me but the final thing i'd say about is I love reading back
on his own individual story,
even before he became a political person.
(26:28):
The Long Walk to Freedom is one book that covers this in his own words, but just other records.
I love reading about how he grew up and how he entered education.
And initially, he ran away from an arranged marriage, which was how I think
he either started his interest in studying in the city or maybe even how he
(26:48):
started his first legal practice he was running away from things at home,
and he dived into academic professional life as a way to kind of differentiate himself.
So he was this this kind of maverick creative bold person and right through
his whole long life he demonstrated more character than i think we tend to see
(27:09):
okay so now i'm going to ask you a very Very tough question, but honest.
There are people in my life that
I have looked up to, people that I have aspired to be in some fashion.
And I'm going to give you an example. example robin williams
(27:31):
and i am
tried to imbue some of the qualities that
he possessed particularly from films like the bird cage dead poet society goodwill
hunting and i tried to let that manifest and play out in the classroom there
(27:52):
was always him kind of sitting on my back.
In terms of stepping out of the comfort zone so what I want to know from you
Ollie you speak with such reverence about Nelson Mandela,
Tell the listeners one trait of Nelson Mandela that you see in yourself.
(28:14):
It's not too self-aggrandizing for me to say that I share his love of music.
I would hesitate to say that I share in a significant degree any of his incredible
dignity, honesty, transparency, and strength of character.
Because I those are things I have to work on every day every
(28:36):
minute of every day to actually have any but
the love of music is something that I think I have naturally and
I don't have to try too much too hard to
love music and he was the kind of person who
would be the first on the dance floor in any room and
he would dress to dance rather than dressing to
give a speech or dressing thing to attend a graduation he would
(28:59):
dress in these loud shirts and he had
a dance and a way of interacting with music which
i think i'm i'm proud to say i
i i picked up
maybe maybe i picked up some of my love of music from watching this guy who
was on our tv screens every single day in in the news in you know throughout
(29:22):
the whole 90s when i was forming my character and he was dancing half the time
that the cameras were rolling and.
I love it. Thank you for being honest. I want to move the needle into the next
part of our conversation.
This is about friend-torships.
(29:42):
And what I mean by that is people that have helped you along the way with regards
to your life as a musician in any fashion.
It could be a music instructor
it could be an engineer it could
be anybody really that you feel like was sitting in your corner got your back
(30:07):
and encouraged you and nudged you to challenge yourself to step out of your
comfort zone a little bit so is there someone that comes to mind
or a couple other people you don't have to name names but
i would love to hear about these people yeah
(30:28):
i i think i can start by explaining where i'm at in my life at the moment i've
become a father eight months ago and i have this eight month daughter she's
brilliant he should be there on my pin board of role models because you know
when you look at your child you think i hope i I can learn something from you,
(30:48):
your inability to see anything wrong in people,
your inability to see anything wrong in the world, your endless optimism.
That's the kind of message that babies bring us.
But the other thing I do when I'm not being a dad or doing my music is I have
(31:08):
a day job to pay the bills.
And I'm something in between a data engineer and a data scientist and a project manager.
Maybe those three roles are combined in what I do.
And I work in a software company and I respect engineers.
So when you mentioned engineers as one option, I've got a ton of those whom I look up to.
(31:32):
I even have some of them on a sort of pinboard digitally.
Sometimes I open the pinboard and I, you know, I look through the faces of the
people who've inspired me. And they might be celebrities.
Some of them are people that no one would have heard of, but whom I've worked with very closely.
But before I kind of explain maybe one or two individuals from that list,
there was a conversation I was having with colleagues last week about this whole
(31:57):
idea of role models and people we learn from.
And the conversation went around
each of us and we each admitted to the
fact or to our tendency to
our tendency to pick up idealized role
models and then some months later get
(32:18):
kind of annoyed at our role models for not quite living up to
the standards of that ideal i think
this is something that all humans have with
all other humans at all levels sometimes whether it's people
they respect and idealize or people that they
see as equals the minute someone near us
messes up or performs worse than we expected we kind of get annoyed and i think
(32:44):
that's a tendency that i'm trying to work on but i'll name two individuals here
so one would be a an old boss actually both of them are old bosses.
One is Jim, I'll say his name, Jim Reynolds.
Jim welcomed me into my first job after I did a data science course.
(33:06):
It was the kind of job where I was going to be the only engineer in the whole
company, a small company of 12 people.
I had to learn on the job rapidly.
And I'm usually quite good at that, but for various reasons,
I don't think I was performing to the standard that I had committed to and the
(33:29):
standard that Jim believed I could adhere to.
So about six weeks into the
job jim had the most brutal
but most helpful one-to-one chat
with me and he said you're you're not towing the line you're not meeting the
standard and i know you can do better but he the way he did it was like so aggressive
(33:53):
and direct and no nonsense that you know, everything clicked into place.
And from then on, I became like, I became a motivated kind of sensible engineer.
Did that bother you? Did that affect your ego at all?
I had to go through a whole, I think it was like a weekend. So he delivered
(34:15):
this news on like the Thursday afternoon.
Then I took Friday. He said, take Friday to think about it.
We're actually talking about the level of expectation here where if you don't
want to come back in on Monday, day, I can work that out and we can just end your contract.
And so I took Friday, I took Saturday, I took Sunday to think about it.
(34:35):
And I was really down in the dumps for like two of those days.
And then I walked in proud on the Monday and I had spoken with my family and
I'd had words with myself.
And I thought, I do really want this job. I do really want this job to work
out and for these people to see me as someone valuable and impactful.
So it wasn't like overnight I became this brilliant person meeting his expectations.
(35:01):
But he could see that on the Monday I was full of the right kind of motivated
energy to start chipping away at the problem.
And then, you know, maybe a month went by and we were thriving.
And if he hadn't had that conversation with me, I think it would have taken
me like two more years and three more jobs getting, you know,
(35:23):
getting kicked out of teams and things until I realized what was going wrong.
But because someone bothered to sit down and have direct words with me for a
five minutes chat, he saved me and himself a lot of complication.
So and i think that kind of directness is
that that honest directness is something i
(35:45):
see robin williams characters have in those films especially dead
poet society i love the way that yeah it's
fearless and he goes straight to the hearts of
these kids and addresses their enthusiasm
but in in a really i don't
know straightforward honest open-eyed sort of way and
coaxes out of them what they what they already had
(36:08):
within them it's not like he's asking them
to become people that they aren't or
can't be jim did that for me so
thanks jim reynolds and obviously i don't know jim but just by that story i
get a sense that as direct as he was he believed in you that's what what he
(36:30):
was telling you like stop fucking around here like i believe that you can add and contribute.
That's right. And that is the
same message that I got from my other role model. I'll talk about Dean.
So Dean Curtis, he's kind of more current.
I think Jim may have retired by now, but Dean is very much
online and active and posts about how to motivate his employees and everything
(36:57):
he posts and writes about and interviews about is exactly what he lived day
to day when I was working in
his organization dean is the kind of
boss that everyone deserves to have
at least once in their career he is
he filled everyone in that organization with energy and inspiration and and
(37:21):
and more importantly like resilience he was a very much promoter of developing
your mental models and your your well-being toolkit,
so that you can be someone who, even on a bad day, because we all have bad days,
you can show up and do yourself proud.
(37:41):
And that's what I learned for two years under Dean's leadership.
What I'm also very impressed by is that despite being the kind of world-class
leader, that means he could go and work at the biggest name companies in the world.
And I don't know, he could be like world famous as an inspirational boss.
(38:03):
He is stuck with that same company that I kind of grew out of my role there.
And I was invited to go work somewhere else. But he stayed at the same one,
leading the same several hundred people.
And he's kind of stuck by them. He sees his organization as a family.
So I try and keep in touch with that organization
(38:23):
and the messages that Dean Curtis is putting out you know every week because
it's such an inspiration to have someone like that in your life and i don't
want to lose that connection so those are my two boss role models jim and dean
i hear shades of nelson mandela personality within these two people,
i think that's fair to say and they they they might be you know.
(38:50):
They might think that's too good a comparison for them but that kind of Because
humility is exactly what is part of the mix.
And if I'm looking at my list here, I'm not going to name all of them,
but all of my role models on my list have some of Nelson Mandela in them.
They've got some humility.
So that if I told them they were on my list, they'd be like,
(39:10):
oh, you shouldn't have me on there.
I'm no role model. That's what they'd say. But yeah, that's what I think is
so important to have in a role model will be that humility and any other characteristics
that you think are important.
I'm going to read something from this book, Build the Life You Want, written by Arthur C.
(39:31):
Brooks, commentary by Oprah Winfrey.
This is a chapter where he talks about friendship being a really important part of finding happiness.
This is what Arthur says.
Don't let an introverted personality or fear rejection block your ability to
(39:53):
make friends. and don't let extroversion prevent you from going deep.
Number two, friendship is ruined when we look for people who are useful to us
for reasons other than friendship itself.
Build links that are based on love and enjoyment of another's company,
(40:14):
not what sheer he can do for you professionally or socially.
Interesting. Number three, too many deep friendships today are spoiled by differences of opinion.
Love for others can be enhanced, not harmed, by differences.
If we elect to show humility instead of pride, then the happiness benefits are enormous.
(40:42):
And last one, the goal for long-term romance is a special kind of friendship, not undying passion.
Companionate love is based on trust and mutual affection.
And what old people who still love each other talk about.
(41:03):
Of course, these are his opinions based on data and research and all the work
that he's done. And these are just kind of what he calls the blissful work of friendship.
And it sounds like to me, Ollie, the friendships that you value and that you
possess and that you contribute towards, these are friendships of authenticity. Authenticity.
(41:30):
These are friendships that I suppose that you have a space to be you and a place
that you can grow with that person in some way, no matter how small or how voluminous.
Would you say that's right? You have very genuine connections to people?
I think that's a result or symptom of time.
(41:55):
I think the people who've managed to put up with my general approach to social justice.
Interaction which is kind of to flip and
be very non-committal about
my relationships the people who i've stuck around are
(42:16):
the ones who mutually or who
have an interest in genuine long-standing relationships
and they can put up with whatever i throw at
them so i've lost some of my best and oldest friends because
i'm just i'm very i i think it took me a long time to realize what friendship
actually should be and what what kind of friends it's important to stick with
(42:40):
but the people who stuck with me despite my kind of confusion are the ones who.
Yeah maybe an analogy is more
helpful here because i've said a lot of words there i once came
up with this phrase and i've never put it anywhere or
maybe it would make a good song lyric but if in
life we could say that the aim is to
(43:03):
burn all your bridges and the
ones that made of stone will stand at the end i think i've i have this like
unintentional subconscious policy of burning all my bridges all the time and
the people who can put up with that treatment i I eventually come around to
saying, hey, I'm really sorry.
(43:23):
I've been quite bad for years.
Thanks for sticking with me. My friend Alex Padanchi, who I mentioned near the
beginning, he's an example of that.
So we go back, way back, and he's a very genuine friend, better than I have been to him or others.
So you said what friendships should be. What should they be then?
(43:49):
I think they need to be about nothing material they need to be about genuine
just love and fascination of the person i've once heard that friendship.
Is defined in five actions that you can take day to day or multiple times a day.
(44:11):
And by taking these actions, or if you observe that somebody is taking these
actions, it means that they are caring and they have a friendship with someone.
So the five actions are something like when you spend quality time with somebody,
when you give someone words
(44:32):
of affirmation when you say thank you to somebody or kind of the opposite or
the converse when you give someone a gift doesn't need to be a big flashy gift
but maybe even just the gift of time or a few words on the birthday and the
fifth one i can't remember
(44:52):
but they are five things that
are like action-based and they're quite simple and if
you think about if i think about friends who
i call people who i call friends but then i challenge myself
when's the last time i spent quality time or got them
a gift or said thank you or gave them words of affirmation and then i realize
(45:13):
it's months and months since i did that i say you know we are what we repeatedly
do am i really a friend to this person and then i kind of take a step back and
say well if i do want to be a friend to this person why am i not doing these things.
And most of the time i do care about these people and i want to be friends but i just forget,
(45:34):
and so i i have to really find ways like whether it's a note-taking app or a
reminder in a calendar or something,
I have to have a daily, weekly practice of reaching out to those people in my
life who I do care about and making sure I take those actions,
because for some reason they don't occur to me naturally.
I think a lot of people are in that boat. They don't think...
(46:00):
We don't have the initiative or the volition to think of others and do right
by others. We need a prompt.
But I think that's fine. That's just a fair little life hack.
And if you just give yourself the prompt, like writing on a sticky note,
say hello to someone today, then that's fine, especially if it helps you maintain
(46:24):
and achieve magical relationships from which you learn how to be a better person.
And I would even go so far as to say, based on what you just said,
sometimes we depend on technology to serve, to act as our way of connecting,
(46:45):
but it can feel really hollow and artificial.
And Arthur C. Brooks says, real friendship requires real contact.
Technology can complement your deepest relationship, but it is a terrible substitute.
Look for more ways to be together in person with the people you love the most.
(47:07):
And of course, I'm not talking about people that are thousands of miles away.
We can't just hop on a plane and go see them. I mean, I understand that.
But in terms of spending time and commitment,
yeah it's i feel like and feel
free to speak to this if you like it's almost like technology
has become this i don't even know what word i i just used artificial means of
(47:37):
communicating with people oh i i did my little you know thumbs up i did my little
like for the day well it doesn't really
mean anything what does it mean anything you
want to say about that yeah for sure the the
digitization of interactions it
(47:58):
not to sound like a luddite or a conspiracy theorist here but the digitization
of social interaction hasn't been done for people it's been done for data gathering Gathering.
Companies who ultimately want to sell
(48:18):
a product to advertisers and the advertisers
need to know who interacts with whom about what topic how often and at what
times of what day so that they can sell things during those times and i think
that that's not a terrible thing i mean i think advertising exists in our world
for a reason and actually has led me to buy or experience things
(48:40):
that i would never have found out about if it wasn't for
these recommender systems existing so i'm
all for technology but i wish
that it was more intuitively obvious
to everyone at the user end that they're kind of being played and by liking
(49:01):
someone's posts you're just feeding a data algorithm you're not actually providing
a human input to the the person who's posts you're liking.
So in addition to liking and commenting and sharing and getting involved digitally
which i think can be really healthy for a lot of people up to a point but in addition to that i think,
(49:26):
meeting up in person is irreplaceable and it's always more than the sum of its
parts as well are, you have to be really kind of cold and dry and formal to
come away from a human interaction,
not having learned something from the other person that you didn't expect to learn.
I think it's almost always the case that we come away from meeting someone in person and,
(49:51):
having grown as people. So finding any excuse and reason to go out and make
eye contact with somebody and sit down with them for one minute,
even that can be all it takes.
And that's the most important thing we can do in our day.
You're on mute. Sorry. We're going to wrap up this part two of this conversation with this comment.
(50:14):
We used to have back to school night where all the parents would come and learn
about the curriculum for the year, field trips, all that stuff.
And I would make it a little unorthodox and get the parents involved at back-to-school
night doing music and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But I would tell all those parents sitting in that room and I would say, you know what?
(50:38):
In addition to supporting your child's school experience this year,
I'm going to challenge all of you to find a connection with children on this
campus that you don't know.
And that starts the minute you walk on this campus, look at a child, say hello to them.
Because just that hello, just that human interaction can mean the world to that
(51:04):
seven, eight, nine, 10 year old person.
And that just speaks to what you were talking about. So I just wanted to share that. Yeah.
Okay. Third part of the conversation. We're going to get into the legs of your work.
And with I want to talk about an album that came out in 2023 it's called Dig
(51:27):
the Mountain and if you could kind of retrace your steps in memory of this album that came out last year,
That's one. And two, I want us to take a listen to a song called Trouble with the Green.
So in putting this album together, Oli, what do you remember?
(51:48):
In 2017, the band broke up and we did a farewell tour.
And at that time, my interaction with music had
become less of the kind of Mandela-inspired love
of dancing and music it had become quite commodified
and music was a business to me i had a
startup company who were doing a concert promotion
(52:10):
that was my story the
other guys all had their individual reasons for wanting out
of stornoway and we all just needed a break
so 2017 we said
goodbye to it all and we ended triumphantly loads
of people came out to the shows and they kept
(52:30):
buying merchandise we said this is the last time you're going to see us so they
wanted to get the farewell t-shirt and the farewell tea towel and we kind of
tied a ribbon around this project and it was obvious to the world that that
was it curtains and we honestly had no intention of getting back together,
But that Christmas, about nine months after we had finished the last performance
(52:56):
on stage, we went and played for a private party, a fan who had been with us since the beginning.
And he's actually on my list of role models, someone who really, every time I meet them.
Fills me with inspiration and so we were
happy to play their private party even though we'd broken up
(53:17):
it was like a favor and a a
small kind of a small event anyway it wasn't like we were getting back together
but something magical happened that evening nine months after we'd broken up
we realized that we still had a love of music and maybe it had taken those nine months to kind of,
(53:40):
forget about all the stresses and strains of the project and say,
well, without the project being a business anymore,
maybe it's okay for it to exist as just a private background thing that we get
together to do once in a while.
And the audience so loved it that the host said, come back again next year.
(54:02):
And then in 2018, they said, come back again next year.
And we You know, over the years, we introduced the odd Christmas cover,
so playing Fairytale of New York.
That's the kind of song that you can't really be in the same room as anyone
else listening to that song and not come out of it, having fallen slightly more
(54:22):
in love with those people.
So by 2021, after four years of playing this same event every year and just
having a real genuine, small-scale human experience, sharing of love, of a 2021.
Brian called me the next morning, pretty much, after that fourth show and said.
(54:47):
There's clearly enough love here that we might want to consider doing our music
more seriously. I want to see you more often.
And it turned out that all of us had been writing music during the pandemic
and the lockdowns. We'd found it to be a very distressing, but also very creatively stimulating time.
So we all brought a bunch of songs to the project. by this
(55:10):
stage it was just me and brian and john so my brother rob no
longer has anything to do with storn away out of his own
choice and we've said we really want to have him back but for
now he wasn't part of this recurring event or
this subsequent conversation about getting back
together got it the first song that
i heard brian bring to the table
(55:31):
and in this new with this new vision that we
might start doing music more seriously was trouble
with the green and it immediately
was a kind of insight for me
into how the pandemic had been for him and for perhaps many other people because
it deals with stress and the jumping around attention wise from topic to topic
(55:55):
and content to content the person the protagonist in the song is a painter who's using different
colors to try and express something of their human story onto a canvas.
And I felt like I'd actually gone through that journey myself.
When he talks about it, he has revealed that it's about an acquaintance of his
who has attention deficit, hyperactive disorder, ADHD.
(56:19):
And so the song is technically a description of their symptoms and their struggles.
But I think it does a really neat job of being.
Technically precise and yet very open to
interpretation a lot of people have asked me whether trouble with
the green means an addiction to marijuana or trouble
(56:40):
with the green being about money so and there
are so many interpretations and i i think because that was the first single
of the album and the first one that i heard demoed in early 2022 it's been with
me through the whole reunification of the band and the re-establishing of a group love of music,
(57:03):
we never thought we'd get back together but this song and this collection of songs.
Made it happen somehow wow see i wish i were still teaching in the classroom
because when i was a teacher i would
look for lyrics metaphors similes personification anything i felt like the
(57:25):
students could really glom onto and not only just appreciate the figurative language,
but also the theme content and the drive behind it.
Red first, red for the sun, brush it up, brush it on thick, see it drip,
drip, dripping down bright red straight from the heart, build it up slow.
(57:46):
The horizon starting to show, you know, and actually, can we take a listen to this song?
Of course. Of course, yeah. Any excuse to hear it again, I'm always happy to.
This is Trouble with the Green by Scorn Away.
Music.
(58:57):
So in hearing this song, it's a real unique song in terms of its textures,
its arrangements, the vocal work.
I feel as though there's a lot of things going on here.
And now that I really understand the backstory, it makes even more sense in
(59:23):
terms of the arrangements. changements.
So lyrically, again, trouble with the green, giving you the blues. I love that line.
Mix it with the white and the colors are bright again.
Trouble with the white led you to the black, puts you in the red,
and you're falling apart again.
So with lyric writing for the band, is this a struggle?
(59:48):
Is this a challenge? I've heard both sides of this.
Does it just the valve open you want to
speak to them well the the sole
lyricist in the band is brian and he has
described to me his process as being sometimes the
words come first and it's the message of
the lyrics that then make it
(01:00:11):
necessary to find some music to support the
lyrics and an example of that would be we are the
battery human because he picked that up that
whole message lyrically from a book by
a colleague of his 20 years ago who works
in conservation and had a specific lecture series that she delivered and that
(01:00:31):
was pretty much the title we are the battery human and he had he had a whole
story to tell to articulate and then the music was kind of the the second stage
of it but But conversely,
a lot of the time, it'll be music that's come from either Brian's guitars,
his kind of jamming at home, or myself or John.
(01:00:53):
We are much more instrumentally driven writers, and we see words most of the
time as an afterthought.
So then Brian comes in and adds his words on top.
And Brian's approach is that the words that he's going to go and record or for
an album or sing on stage, he really needs to be able to feel those words with conviction.
(01:01:15):
So that's why he will always end up being the lyricist.
He might rewrite something even quite substantially so that it's about an experience
he's had and he can sing with conviction.
In other projects of mine, I've known experiences where songwriters are basically
instrumental composers and words come much later as an afterthought.
(01:01:40):
Some of my favourite acts who I think.
Have that might be, let me think. Well, Bon Iver might be a good example of that.
Bon Iver, who was a label mate of ours for a while.
A lot of the time people don't understand what he's actually singing.
And I think I've read that his first album was just Nonsense Sounds.
(01:02:00):
And he later added words to make it kind of at least resemble a song.
But you know, some of the most successful in the music in
the world like bonnie verse can be not about
words at all but just about the sonic experience
and i find that kind of fascinating but
at the other extreme probably my favorite musician
(01:02:23):
of all time is a guy called kevin barnes from a
band called of montreal and his songs are so
so eloquent it's like
they're fully formed not just sentences but
poetic lines and i couldn't
care less what he does musically even though what he does musically is
probably the some of the best music i've ever heard and tried
(01:02:44):
to learn and been inspired by he's an incredible bass
player arranger of strings everything he plays all his own instruments but when
i come back to the lyrics they are like they are just so impressive and so you
there is no single way that works for for music you can be lyrics driven or
music driven and And at the end of the day,
(01:03:06):
whatever works for you as an artist to do honest output,
that people can see what's in your heart, I think that's the most important thing. Oh my goodness.
Nailed it. Absolutely. In transitioning into something that we have talked about
(01:03:26):
in this conversation, the connection to people.
We are the battery human. I'm going to read some lyrics for people.
I'm going to try not to sing it, but in memory of my students,
a phenomenal group of students that year, love these lyrics so much because
(01:03:47):
of what they evoke and the imagery.
Staying inside on this fine day, we'll stare at a screen like every morning.
And outside the window, spring is here. We're going to hibernate all year under
a pile of A4 snowflakes because we're the new generation. We are the battery human.
(01:04:08):
But we were born to be free range.
We've got the hole at our fingers. I mean, this is such wonderful,
sharp, crisp writing metaphorically.
And if a 10-year-old can understand that concept, man, you've got something
powerful there. And that's what that song evoked for us during that school year.
(01:04:32):
And it became such an anthem for us to sing this song all the time. I want to know, Ollie.
I remember telling those students, not just with this song, but other songs
as well, when all of you harmonize, it's fucking glorious.
It's Beach Boys to me.
(01:04:53):
What are your thoughts on that? Thank you. Yeah, it's really rewarding and fulfilling
to hear you recite those lyrics and say that they're eloquent.
And to mention the harmonies, the harmony aspect of Stornoway didn't come into
even a conception of ours until maybe 2007.
(01:05:16):
So we would have been together by about two years by this point.
We were just one singer who
played guitar and then a bass the
drums and then a keyboard cellist guitarist wizard who was john none of us volunteered
to sing until i think i i mentioned that on the demo version of i saw you blink
(01:05:42):
that had been making its rounds through the pubs and venues in Oxford to try and get us some gigs.
There was a second vocal part. So it's the bit that goes, Oh,
Lucy, could you really be the one that I've been waiting for?
And I said, I don't know if we've got plans for that thing one day,
(01:06:03):
but should I just kind of do a placeholder?
I just sing it along when we're playing it. And Brian said, Oh,
I thought none of you would ever ask I've been waiting for one of you to volunteer
to do that backing vocal and,
then I start so I started singing it and then I
think we decided to add Rob my brother and
he was singing the same part but then he split onto a different harmonic line
(01:06:25):
in the choruses and later John added his line added another line but until we
had constructed that whole four-part harmony for that song we'd We'd never seen
ourselves as a harmony band, a vocal harmony band.
But as soon as we'd done that one, Zorbing came along.
Brian wrote Zorbing, and that very clearly has rich vocal harmony.
(01:06:48):
It's like the whoa that distinguishes it from verse to chorus.
And other than that, there's no change to indicate verse to chorus.
There's a slight melodic change in the lead vocal.
So what I'm saying is we've grown organically and developed our identity as
a harmony band, a choral harmony band.
(01:07:10):
We never set out to be like that.
And it's been quite the adventure because in the early days, we probably,
on the record you hear of Battery Human on the Beachcombers album,
Beachcombers' Windowsill album, them that's probably a mix
of the 75th take and
(01:07:30):
the 301st take and the 297th take
we we'd spent like a whole weekend singing
that song over and over and over and in the
course of those takes we worked out how to sing
in unison which is really tough it's surprisingly
tough and then how to really break apart our
harmonies in an effective way that suited our different ranges
(01:07:53):
and on different timbres and then the end result
i think the final clicking together of stornoway's harmonies
was when we put out get low because that song has all four vocalists being very
prominent the whole time and we're all in harmony the whole time so it's polyphony
and it took us because of get low comes out in 2015 we'd been together for 10 years fully 10 years,
(01:08:18):
that's how long it took for us to find our feet to find our voices properly
I could spend hours talking about your work, and you're providing such little nuggets of gold here.
You know what? I want to take this time and say thank you. And I'm going to
say it in a way based on this book.
(01:08:38):
This is called Daring Greatly, written by Brene Brown.
This is about how the The Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead.
And in this chapter, she talks about the vulnerability armory that we wear.
And we're so scared to step out of our comfort zones because of fear of rejection. You know all this.
(01:09:05):
But I'm going to say thank you to your band because going back memory lane with
those students, I remember getting up there singing with the boys and in acapella.
And I'm only a teacher. I'm not a music teacher.
I don't know all the lingo and the phrases that one would need,
(01:09:27):
but who cares? We were having a blast.
And so I let down my guard and I sang with those boys and girls at times multiple
times through your music because of your music and I just wanted to say thank
you and I I'm glad I have this opportunity to do that.
(01:09:51):
And I think if I were to ever speak to those students again from that time period,
they're all, you know, they're grown up now. They're probably out of college.
I bet you I can put on that song and they would pick up and just start singing it. So there you go.
That's great to know. So it's left an impact on them and on you.
(01:10:14):
And I think, you know, the funny thing is, even though I'm in the band,
it took 15 years for me to feel the impact of We Are The Battery Human,
that song, because I think I have had to have my own kind of adventures in relation
to mental health, nature, getting outside,
(01:10:35):
reconnecting with people, these different like compass points,
cardinal points of that song's message.
As a 20-year-old, when Brian brought that very mature, wise song into our repertoire,
I hadn't had my adventures yet to understand that song.
But these days, I always refer to that as the song that most directly and fully
(01:11:00):
captures Stornoway's message,
because I've learned over the course of almost 20 years with the band that that's
the song that is most about life and how life relates to nature,
music, and social interaction.
Direction so and it all goes all the way through our catalog i've realized mental
well-being and how it relates to creativity and the great outdoors from we are
(01:11:25):
the battery human through to trouble with the green and excelsior these are
other songs from the latest album.
They're about zooming out to see the bigger picture and realizing that you're
part of something much greater than one person's life or one person's screen
that they're looking at for their job or one person's small role in society.
(01:11:50):
We're all part of something much bigger. And I think, yeah, those are the songs
that really deliver that message.
Could you tell us what's coming down the line for the band in 2024?
It's going to happen before the episode comes out i guess so i'll mention
the other ones as well we've got love trails festival which is
an endurance running and music festival so as
(01:12:12):
part of our performance there i'm going to lead a 10 kilometer six mile run
around the gawa peninsula going to look at rare bird habitats and then a couple
of hours later i'll be on stage playing the headline slot at the festival so
that's going to be a wacky weekend by the way love trails is is coming to California
in, I think, later this year.
So there might be a tie-in there.
(01:12:35):
If you mentioned them in the show notes or something, they might take an interest
in the episode. So maybe I'll just succinctly say that.
Look out for Love Trails California because their first episode of that new
festival is happening sometime later this year.
Then I should mention the, yeah, Yeah, there's two August festivals.
(01:12:59):
The one I'm really excited about is Greenbelt Festival in Kettering,
which is kind of middle England.
It's just getting out into the great outdoors. It's a very spiritual festival,
and they've got some great acts in the lineup.
And then we're kind of knuckling down to writing new music for a new album.
And that might be two years away, but we're going to be very,
(01:13:22):
very busy in the coming months, sowing the seeds of new inspiration and gathering
threads from the natural world
around us and bringing them into the studio to create some more music.
Are you all hearing this, listeners? Because this is some really good stuff
coming up for people that can go out and participate.
And if you can't, check out all their music, Spotify, Bandcamp.
(01:13:44):
Head on over to Facebook, Instagram.
Ollie's got a great Instagram page filled, replete, impregnated with nature.
And really cool images and video. And very personable.
I want to wrap up this conversation with a little bit of
fun fun this is where I just toss out
(01:14:07):
some things that come to mind and you just share with the listeners what comes
to your mind when I say these things so it's just a little think of it like
the lightning round got it got it okay here Here we go, Oli. California.
Sunshine. New York. Misery. Pizza or Thai food? A choice between them.
(01:14:33):
So I would go for pizza every time.
Ocean or land? Ocean. Flying or driving? Flying.
George, Paul, Ringo or John?
I think it's George. An album that you feel is underappreciated.
(01:14:55):
Well, I think Skeletal Lamping by Elf Montreal.
A current swear word you enjoy saying.
I use fig. Fig, yeah, figging.
Sounds good to me. The name of a book you last read. The Mirror and the Light.
(01:15:17):
South Africa. Maskandi. It's the name of a traditional folk guitar style,
and I think it captures the whole spirit of the country.
Positive and negative, good and bad, solo and group, stay-at-home and adventure.
Everything's in that one genre, and you can play it as a solo or in a whole band.
(01:15:43):
Okay, great. A flaw of yours that gets you into trouble.
Telling Little White Lies. A trait of yours that you're very proud of?
Improvisational musicality. Favorite day of the week? Tuesday. Coffee or tea?
Decaf coffee. Guitar or bass? Guitar.
(01:16:04):
Is your bed made? Yeah. Fatherhood? Fun. Stornoway?
Precious. Who is Olly Stedman? Well that's a question that Dean Curtis taught me to ask.
Who are you? Who are you? You have to ask yourself that question every morning.
I really struggle with that one, but at the moment I would say.
(01:16:30):
South African multi-instrumentalist triathlete. Thank you so much Olly Stedman
for participating in Surprise Cast.
Thank you to all the listeners for listening to this special feature.
Again, you can check out Stornoway's work all online.
Look for those dates, enjoy the music, pay attention to those lyrics.
(01:16:54):
I'm very grateful and honored to have this
conversation with the a gentleman that is acutely
aware of his role in this
crazy thing we call life and is
offering up all these little gifts along the way for us to enjoy so thank you
thanks so much for having me william it's been a pleasure and i think like we
(01:17:18):
said earlier about human interactions so you've taught me a lot through this
conversation more than i expected to learn and i think it's been more than the sum of its parts.
So thank you. Those are very nice words.
Take care, everyone. My name is W, host of the High Arts on the Edge page, host of Surprise Cast.
(01:17:39):
And remember, great music is all around us.
We just have to keep our ears open.
Music.
Music.
(00:16):
Hello, everyone. This is W, host of the High Art on the Edge page, host of Surprise Cast.
I'm so excited because we have a wonderful guest here in Surprise Cast land
who's going to talk about life as a musician in a band that I've quite admired over the years.
(00:39):
In fact, I'm going to start our conversation with a little backstory.
I was a fifth grade teacher back in the Bay Area for 23 years.
I used to incorporate quite a bit of music in my classroom.
Every day my students would sing, we would dance, and it was really this notion of bringing my class,
(01:04):
my students together in a way that pushed and
encouraged them to step out of their comfort zone well one
day I decided to throw a storm way out at their ears and that was of course
beachcombers windowsill and there was a song in there that I decided you know
(01:25):
what I think this is a song they're gonna gravitate towards and that was we
We are the battery humans.
Well, on Spotify, you can have the lyrics scrolling. And so I had a huge screen in my classroom.
So I'd bring all the students up. I'd separate the boys from the girls.
And it took about two or three plays.
(01:48):
And the next day I played it and I just called the boys up. I said,
boys, time for you to sing this song.
It's as if I was handing them candy. I
don't know what happened but they could not wait to sing that song and I think
not that they could hit some of those harmonic high notes because they're only
(02:10):
in fifth grade but that song really resonated with the boys and it really bonded them.
Felt as if they were like kind of the old school throwback singers.
Maybe a little bit of the Smother Brothers or Clancy Brothers.
And just kind of coming together based on this song.
(02:32):
Needless to say, at the end of the year, we performed many songs for the parents.
But in particular, the boys sang that song a cappella.
And it was spine tingling. Because they took it seriously.
They honor the band and they honor the song.
So that's kind of a backstory into this band.
(02:56):
And so I want to welcome Oli Stedman from the band Stornoway. How are you?
Thanks, William. I'm doing really well. Thanks. And it's great to be here. I love that story.
And that is one of my favorite songs in our repertoire.
It's also the one that I think most directly captures the message of Stornoway,
(03:17):
which is all about reconnecting with nature getting outside getting away from technology.
And rebalancing in the name of
well-being and connecting to something bigger outside
oneself so it's a thrill to hear that a whole class of kids connected with the
message that they felt we were telling in the song maybe they picked up a different
(03:40):
kind of message but it's the one that's most explicitly about this reconnecting
to something bigger outside yourself and and,
to nature in particular i love that message and we did talk about that because where i taught,
technology played an enormous role in the classroom and there would be days just say you know what,
(04:06):
turn off your devices please let's just talk let's just connect so we went over the lyrics,
and i pounded and pounded that message all year long so i'm glad that i was able to,
present that song to him not just a way of singing but also understanding its thematic concern,
(04:29):
which i wholeheartedly agree it is kind of the identity and spirit of your band.
Before we go launching into the band's work and your role and contributions,
I would like to retrace our steps here, Ollie, and I would want to focus on
three pillars, if you will, and that's going to be your childhood experiences,
(04:55):
friendtorships, and then the body of your work, and then we'll wrap up today's
conversation with a little bit of fun, fun time, and I'll explain that later.
So this conversation is going to be built around a book called Build the Life
You Want, The Art and Science of Getting Happier.
(05:16):
This is written by a well-known author by the name of Arthur C.
Brooks with some commentary by Oprah Winfrey.
And it talks about exactly what you just mentioned. How do we stay connected to each other?
But most importantly, how do we stay connected to ourselves in a sea of fucking
(05:42):
chaos and noise and distractions,
Twitter, all of that stuff?
So, in my hand, I have a book called Good Grief, Peanuts Pick Me Up.
Ollie, I'm going to read a little cartoon to you, and I'm going to ask you a question.
(06:02):
And I want you to think about how this may relate to your childhood experiences.
Are you familiar with the Peanuts, Charlie Brown? Yeah, I never quite figured
out the kind of role of Charlie Brown as part of Peanuts.
Was Peanuts the name of the title in the story and he was just a character?
(06:25):
And I never got to figure out the names of everyone, maybe Snoopy, but no one else.
But it's like I saw that cartoon every week in the weekly paper that I'm hanging out at home.
Home and I never quite knew what I was meant to be interpreting from it I mean
this was me as a very young kid but I am aware of it and I kind of have an affectionate
(06:45):
memory for the confusion,
that it used to bring me I just I guess I was too young to understand what it
was trying to get at my preferred cartoon of that era was maybe Calvin and Hobbes
which is very similar in fact the characters kind of look different look similar
in their proportions and I was actually so keen on Calvin and Hobbes that I
(07:06):
would go and trace those cartoons.
And I really did aspire to be a cartoonist one day.
But yeah, in terms of the age difference and the message that I picked up,
I was more of a Calvin and Hobbes fan than a Peanuts fan.
But I'm really keen to see what we get from it now in this reading.
You can't go wrong with Calvin and Hobbes.
(07:29):
Okay, so two people are sitting on a doghouse, Peppermint Patty and Snoopy.
Peppermint Patty's best friend Marcy is strolling along, and she walks up to
him and says, Now what are you doing, sir?
Peppermint Patty says, I'm not doing anything, Marcy.
I'm just going to sit here for the rest of my life with my old friend Snoopy.
(07:54):
Oh, don't do that, sir. Come down and go to school with me.
Peppermint Patty says, Nope. I'm going
to stay right here because old Snoopy
is the only one who understands me and Snoopy
says I do that's correct
(08:15):
so Ollie my question is actually simple and elaborate however you will tell
the listeners positive and or negative school experiences that you had that still,
linger in your mind?
(08:36):
I think I have had a very...
Spicy sidewinding adventure when it
comes to thinking about school i grew
up in south africa and from age
three i was in the creche which
(08:58):
is like the kindergarten for the university
where my folks worked and the
kids in the creche were all the kids of
academics so we were all kind of
wacky and overstimulated because
we had very busy creative parents from
(09:19):
there i went to a very progressive independent school in the city which was
one of the first schools to go against the apartheid laws and regulations and
so it allowed kids of color which is very important,
and more and more important as time goes by.
(09:39):
Looking back at that important opportunity
that I had, that so many of my contemporaries didn't in South Africa.
By age 15, it meant that I had learned Zulu, and Afrikaans was another language
we had to learn, but Zulu was the one I really cared about.
And later in life, I would go and form a band who sang in Zulu,
(10:01):
which was another an aspect of my education
that shouldn't have been allowed if you'd gone on like
what the state wanted us to learn but the school was progressive enough that
it they taught us zulu and zulu music and zulu culture and history as well i
also picked up fossa which is another language very similar to zulu it's one
(10:22):
of the 11 official languages of south africa very widely spoken,
and much more widely spoken than English, for instance.
At 15, everything kind of spiced up even more because I unintentionally moved to the UK.
It was going to be a one-year sabbatical for my academic dad,
but it ended up being a permanent move.
(10:45):
And I never got to say goodbye to my granny, my granddad, and my school friends.
So I guess I could pause the journey there and say that that would be the time
around which I would draw the saddest memories, the difficult memories.
And maybe if I pick one for you, it would just be that memory of arriving in
(11:08):
this school in Oxford in the UK, very academic town, kind of.
Competitive and dry would be another word to put it
like i never got out into nature anymore because
i'd moved from the drakenspoke mountains of south africa to
inner city oxford with these tiny roads
a thousand years old down which lines of traffic tried to speed every day and
(11:31):
there was pollution and formality and i remember for the first six months of
being there that i would just kind of roam the corridors of the chemistry block at lunchtimes,
not knowing who to talk to or really what to do with myself.
And I think at the time I had a kind of resilience, which meant I didn't see
(11:53):
that as solitude or anything to be sorry about.
But years later, I do see it as a sad thing because I think of all the relationships
that I could have formed or things I could have done with those tons.
But I was just like kind of a scared, lonely kid walking
through the corridors and that all ended
when my best friend Alex Badamchi
(12:15):
turned up out of the blue he was another kid who was kind of strolling around
alone at lunch times and break times and we found each other and we formed a
band and we started playing and music was the thing that then pulled me out of my teenage solitude.
The happy memory that I would contrast that with would be rewinding to the Drakensberg
(12:41):
Mountains in South Africa, where I spent maybe two full years.
I was in the boarding school, so I was five hours away from Johannesburg.
This is a second school that I didn't mention, but it was kind of the follow-on
school from the one that I did mention, and both of them taught Zulu.
So there I am in the Drakensberg Mountains, learning Zulu every day.
(13:02):
And I was so lucky.
And as time goes by, again, I realized more and more how lucky I was to go to
that school because it had all manner of South African wildlife living on the school.
You could walk out the door and encounter water buffalo, impala.
There was a herd of zebra down by the river, which was only like a half hour hike away.
(13:26):
Giraffe and warthogs, Anything that didn't eat little school kids,
they allowed to kind of breed and nurture on that estate.
So my happiest memories from school would be just, yeah, seeing the mountains
every morning and roaming around this beautiful natural world whilst studying
(13:49):
really interesting topics.
And then later, you know, moving to Oxford, all that was kind of evaporated.
There you go. The sad and the happy. the sweet and the sour thank you yeah.
You had mentioned about your parents being creative type. Is that correct?
That's right. So can you elaborate that on a little bit more?
(14:11):
Sure. I think I'd say they're creative in the way that any academic people tend to be creative.
If you focused on a specific topic or sector and you study and you have to write
creatively, even within a very tight framework.
So they didn't do creative subjects necessarily later in their careers,
(14:35):
but you have to write in such a way that you're breathing your own ideas into
a topic so that it feels fresh and new to the people who are going to read your material.
So my dad was the more creative side.
He did theater and drama.
And in South Africa in the 70s and 80s, that again was something that was very
(14:59):
affected by what the state wanted citizens to, how they wanted citizens to be.
My dad found that as a drama student in the early 70s, he was studying only white playwrights.
And it took a journey to New York, where he did his master's in theater studies.
(15:23):
It took that journey and meeting people outside of South Africa for him to realize
and be told by them, hey, there's a whole bunch of black playwrights that you
clearly don't even know about.
You need to do better and on one hand he had an excuse which is that the state was not only.
Banning the performance of any
(15:46):
of these black playwrights work but actively stopping
the export and promotion and development of
any of their talent and even black
actors weren't being allowed out to work properly so he
had that as an excuse but on the other hand he thought even though
that's the situation i could be doing better so he came back
(16:06):
from new york having completed the masters there and then
spent i guess it must 10 to 15 years developing black
playwrights locally and his phd thesis which took seven years was a deep dive
into who are the indigenous people who are writing the indigenous stories and
(16:27):
telling the real truth of the South African culture.
And why are they being silenced? Eventually in 91, that led to him.
Taking some of these plays and also his family so i got to go along with this
to the states for a whole year in 91 and we based ourselves in virginia which
(16:50):
was like a culture shock for me,
and i mean i was four at the time so i didn't really
have much i didn't feel much shock but
i i was i was thrilled to kind of see
a new place but he toured these plays these unheard
of plays around the country and they won
some awards i can't remember the names of
(17:12):
these but they were some pretty big awards and he brought
those lost hidden plays to
a global audience so that was
the kind of creative side that my dad was involved
with and he then set up courses to be taught back in South Africa to the students
(17:33):
coming into the university to ensure that they didn't have to go outside or
go outside the country to learn about their own country's culture.
So these plays were added to the syllabus.
And that's something I'm really proud of my dad for achieving.
On my mom's side, you could say
less creative because hers was all about the the
(17:55):
labor negotiations and labor
laws that affect south african industry so she
was involved in negotiating fair wages
for gold miners for instance and that's
all about like law and dispute resolution but
you have to be very creative when you're trying
(18:15):
to find solutions in alternative dispute resolution
contexts because you can't just look it
all up in a case law book and you can't just
rely on like a set of rules necessarily
you tend to have two parties who have a
disagreement that seems intractable like
they both want something that the other refuses
(18:38):
to give but at that very moment you you
the best mediators come up
with creative solutions solutions as to how someone
can get from a situation something
they didn't realize they wanted and their counterpart can
give them that thing whilst getting something they didn't realize they
wanted and everyone ends up in a win-win situation so that's.
(19:01):
The kind of yeah different kind of creativity that my mom was bringing and i've
learned and i'm continuing to learn those different kinds of creativity from
each of them i'm speaking with ollie stedman and And just learning so much in
such little time already about your experiences in South Africa.
(19:21):
I want to stay on South Africa just for a little bit longer.
I want to read something to you, and I just want to get your response to it.
This is a lyric by a very famous singer from a song that he sang that became
almost, well, I would say anthemic.
(19:43):
You can blow out a candle, but you can't blow out a fire.
Peter Gabriel, Biko.
I've never been to South Africa. I feel as though that song was a lens into
a little bit of that challenging artist experience.
(20:05):
And there have been others along the way. Eddie Grant, Give Me Hope, Joanna.
When you hear Peter Gabriel honor Stephen Biko in this song,
in the political message,
the social commentary, I do want to know, Oli, is that something that as you are as a musician,
(20:30):
do you feel that song gives a somewhat accurate representation of the social
strife that was happening during that time?
I think the strangest thing about my South African upbringing was that I was
isolated from a lot of the best music in the world,
(20:52):
because either overtly the apartheid government banned some music from coming into the country.
Famously the Beatles records were all unattainable and the story of Sugarman
or Rodriguez his music was the opposite they there was some bootleg record that
came in but you couldn't buy the real thing because no one would distribute
(21:14):
it to South Africa or so not overtly but just kind of.
Indirectly big labels and distributing companies wouldn't send their music to
South Africa So the result was,
I'd heard of the Beatles and Elton John and Pink Floyd and some of these huge
acts and Peter Gabriel in childhood, but I never heard their music until I got to the UK.
(21:39):
And so the two names you mentioned, Peter Gabriel, I've since become aware of
his catalogue and Stornoway have actually worked together.
Very closely and almost directly with him we've
recorded in his studio a couple of times and the great relationship with
his label real world real world eddie eddie grant
we don't i don't have any experience of so i
(22:01):
can't and i can't say i've i've heard either song and so
i don't know if i can comment on that but from the lyrics
that you quoted there i think those are
exactly the kinds of lyrics that chimed
well with the kind of liberation movement and
wave of people in South Africa what they wanted to see
(22:22):
through the late 70s through to the 90s when
everything eventually went democratic there was a very positive tangible wave
of political activity and emotion driving what seemed like everybody in South
Africa but obviously I lived in the kind of bubble of that progressive liberal society.
(22:44):
Even today, 30 years after democracy, there are pockets of South Africa who
want to return back to the way things were in apartheid, which is really shocking
and incomprehensible to me.
And obviously for them, those lyrics would not shine and would be anathema.
But I think for the majority of people in South Africa or watching South Africa
(23:06):
through those crucial 20, 30 years,
those kinds of songs were so important in galvanizing the protest message and
making people realize they weren't just individually disagreeing with the status quo.
There was a whole groundswell of people and the fire was getting bigger and brighter.
And eventually in 1994, the fire kind of made its feelings known and the the
(23:31):
landslide ANC success kicked in and it became a rainbow nation.
So yeah, I'm a huge fan of any of those songs, those protest songs that helped achieve that.
When you hear the words Nelson Mandela, what conjures up in your mind?
(23:53):
A one-of-a-kind person who i was very fortunate to meet i think maybe twice,
he was so special and a genuine role model like every role model and every human there are,
(24:14):
many sides to the story and i i
nowadays hear people saying oh nelson mandela wasn't you know a total angel
there were things that there were compromises he had to do to get the government
working effectively and achieve the kind of change they needed most of the detractors
(24:35):
though i hear say this are people who,
feel that he compromised too much around the 1994 unity government formation,
whereas I think that he pragmatically brought together so many different parties
and he had to do that in order to stop civil war happening.
(24:57):
But there are a lot of purists who wanted him to stick more closely to.
I don't know, like a simplistic political agenda. But he single-handedly achieved the Rainbow Nation.
And for the next, let's see, for the next 15 years, he was very active and provided
(25:22):
the kind of anchor that South Africa needed.
I think the high point of the whole Nelson Mandela story in my head is 1995.
When he turned up at the Rugby World Cup final and South Africa won the Rugby World Cup.
It was one year into its existence as a democracy, a rainbow nation,
and Mandela, who had never expressed any interest in rugby,
(25:45):
I mean, almost the opposite, he completely justifiably saw it as a colonial
relic and something belonging to the apartheid era.
But he turned up and defied expectations
and he owned that moment and then
he kind of raised the trophy with the white south
african captain andrew pinar and together they
(26:07):
they've created this image of south africa is done with the past we are a champion
nation we can achieve the unexpected and yeah that's the image that encapsulates
nelson mandela for me but the final thing i'd say about is I love reading back
on his own individual story,
even before he became a political person.
(26:28):
The Long Walk to Freedom is one book that covers this in his own words, but just other records.
I love reading about how he grew up and how he entered education.
And initially, he ran away from an arranged marriage, which was how I think
he either started his interest in studying in the city or maybe even how he
(26:48):
started his first legal practice he was running away from things at home,
and he dived into academic professional life as a way to kind of differentiate himself.
So he was this this kind of maverick creative bold person and right through
his whole long life he demonstrated more character than i think we tend to see
(27:09):
okay so now i'm going to ask you a very Very tough question, but honest.
There are people in my life that
I have looked up to, people that I have aspired to be in some fashion.
And I'm going to give you an example. example robin williams
(27:31):
and i am
tried to imbue some of the qualities that
he possessed particularly from films like the bird cage dead poet society goodwill
hunting and i tried to let that manifest and play out in the classroom there
(27:52):
was always him kind of sitting on my back.
In terms of stepping out of the comfort zone so what I want to know from you
Ollie you speak with such reverence about Nelson Mandela,
Tell the listeners one trait of Nelson Mandela that you see in yourself.
(28:14):
It's not too self-aggrandizing for me to say that I share his love of music.
I would hesitate to say that I share in a significant degree any of his incredible
dignity, honesty, transparency, and strength of character.
Because I those are things I have to work on every day every
(28:36):
minute of every day to actually have any but
the love of music is something that I think I have naturally and
I don't have to try too much too hard to
love music and he was the kind of person who
would be the first on the dance floor in any room and
he would dress to dance rather than dressing to
give a speech or dressing thing to attend a graduation he would
(28:59):
dress in these loud shirts and he had
a dance and a way of interacting with music which
i think i'm i'm proud to say i
i i picked up
maybe maybe i picked up some of my love of music from watching this guy who
was on our tv screens every single day in in the news in you know throughout
(29:22):
the whole 90s when i was forming my character and he was dancing half the time
that the cameras were rolling and.
I love it. Thank you for being honest. I want to move the needle into the next
part of our conversation.
This is about friend-torships.
(29:42):
And what I mean by that is people that have helped you along the way with regards
to your life as a musician in any fashion.
It could be a music instructor
it could be an engineer it could
be anybody really that you feel like was sitting in your corner got your back
(30:07):
and encouraged you and nudged you to challenge yourself to step out of your
comfort zone a little bit so is there someone that comes to mind
or a couple other people you don't have to name names but
i would love to hear about these people yeah
(30:28):
i i think i can start by explaining where i'm at in my life at the moment i've
become a father eight months ago and i have this eight month daughter she's
brilliant he should be there on my pin board of role models because you know
when you look at your child you think i hope i I can learn something from you,
(30:48):
your inability to see anything wrong in people,
your inability to see anything wrong in the world, your endless optimism.
That's the kind of message that babies bring us.
But the other thing I do when I'm not being a dad or doing my music is I have
(31:08):
a day job to pay the bills.
And I'm something in between a data engineer and a data scientist and a project manager.
Maybe those three roles are combined in what I do.
And I work in a software company and I respect engineers.
So when you mentioned engineers as one option, I've got a ton of those whom I look up to.
(31:32):
I even have some of them on a sort of pinboard digitally.
Sometimes I open the pinboard and I, you know, I look through the faces of the
people who've inspired me. And they might be celebrities.
Some of them are people that no one would have heard of, but whom I've worked with very closely.
But before I kind of explain maybe one or two individuals from that list,
there was a conversation I was having with colleagues last week about this whole
(31:57):
idea of role models and people we learn from.
And the conversation went around
each of us and we each admitted to the
fact or to our tendency to
our tendency to pick up idealized role
models and then some months later get
(32:18):
kind of annoyed at our role models for not quite living up to
the standards of that ideal i think
this is something that all humans have with
all other humans at all levels sometimes whether it's people
they respect and idealize or people that they
see as equals the minute someone near us
messes up or performs worse than we expected we kind of get annoyed and i think
(32:44):
that's a tendency that i'm trying to work on but i'll name two individuals here
so one would be a an old boss actually both of them are old bosses.
One is Jim, I'll say his name, Jim Reynolds.
Jim welcomed me into my first job after I did a data science course.
(33:06):
It was the kind of job where I was going to be the only engineer in the whole
company, a small company of 12 people.
I had to learn on the job rapidly.
And I'm usually quite good at that, but for various reasons,
I don't think I was performing to the standard that I had committed to and the
(33:29):
standard that Jim believed I could adhere to.
So about six weeks into the
job jim had the most brutal
but most helpful one-to-one chat
with me and he said you're you're not towing the line you're not meeting the
standard and i know you can do better but he the way he did it was like so aggressive
(33:53):
and direct and no nonsense that you know, everything clicked into place.
And from then on, I became like, I became a motivated kind of sensible engineer.
Did that bother you? Did that affect your ego at all?
I had to go through a whole, I think it was like a weekend. So he delivered
(34:15):
this news on like the Thursday afternoon.
Then I took Friday. He said, take Friday to think about it.
We're actually talking about the level of expectation here where if you don't
want to come back in on Monday, day, I can work that out and we can just end your contract.
And so I took Friday, I took Saturday, I took Sunday to think about it.
(34:35):
And I was really down in the dumps for like two of those days.
And then I walked in proud on the Monday and I had spoken with my family and
I'd had words with myself.
And I thought, I do really want this job. I do really want this job to work
out and for these people to see me as someone valuable and impactful.
So it wasn't like overnight I became this brilliant person meeting his expectations.
(35:01):
But he could see that on the Monday I was full of the right kind of motivated
energy to start chipping away at the problem.
And then, you know, maybe a month went by and we were thriving.
And if he hadn't had that conversation with me, I think it would have taken
me like two more years and three more jobs getting, you know,
(35:23):
getting kicked out of teams and things until I realized what was going wrong.
But because someone bothered to sit down and have direct words with me for a
five minutes chat, he saved me and himself a lot of complication.
So and i think that kind of directness is
that that honest directness is something i
(35:45):
see robin williams characters have in those films especially dead
poet society i love the way that yeah it's
fearless and he goes straight to the hearts of
these kids and addresses their enthusiasm
but in in a really i don't
know straightforward honest open-eyed sort of way and
coaxes out of them what they what they already had
(36:08):
within them it's not like he's asking them
to become people that they aren't or
can't be jim did that for me so
thanks jim reynolds and obviously i don't know jim but just by that story i
get a sense that as direct as he was he believed in you that's what what he
(36:30):
was telling you like stop fucking around here like i believe that you can add and contribute.
That's right. And that is the
same message that I got from my other role model. I'll talk about Dean.
So Dean Curtis, he's kind of more current.
I think Jim may have retired by now, but Dean is very much
online and active and posts about how to motivate his employees and everything
(36:57):
he posts and writes about and interviews about is exactly what he lived day
to day when I was working in
his organization dean is the kind of
boss that everyone deserves to have
at least once in their career he is
he filled everyone in that organization with energy and inspiration and and
(37:21):
and more importantly like resilience he was a very much promoter of developing
your mental models and your your well-being toolkit,
so that you can be someone who, even on a bad day, because we all have bad days,
you can show up and do yourself proud.
(37:41):
And that's what I learned for two years under Dean's leadership.
What I'm also very impressed by is that despite being the kind of world-class
leader, that means he could go and work at the biggest name companies in the world.
And I don't know, he could be like world famous as an inspirational boss.
(38:03):
He is stuck with that same company that I kind of grew out of my role there.
And I was invited to go work somewhere else. But he stayed at the same one,
leading the same several hundred people.
And he's kind of stuck by them. He sees his organization as a family.
So I try and keep in touch with that organization
(38:23):
and the messages that Dean Curtis is putting out you know every week because
it's such an inspiration to have someone like that in your life and i don't
want to lose that connection so those are my two boss role models jim and dean
i hear shades of nelson mandela personality within these two people,
i think that's fair to say and they they they might be you know.
(38:50):
They might think that's too good a comparison for them but that kind of Because
humility is exactly what is part of the mix.
And if I'm looking at my list here, I'm not going to name all of them,
but all of my role models on my list have some of Nelson Mandela in them.
They've got some humility.
So that if I told them they were on my list, they'd be like,
(39:10):
oh, you shouldn't have me on there.
I'm no role model. That's what they'd say. But yeah, that's what I think is
so important to have in a role model will be that humility and any other characteristics
that you think are important.
I'm going to read something from this book, Build the Life You Want, written by Arthur C.
(39:31):
Brooks, commentary by Oprah Winfrey.
This is a chapter where he talks about friendship being a really important part of finding happiness.
This is what Arthur says.
Don't let an introverted personality or fear rejection block your ability to
(39:53):
make friends. and don't let extroversion prevent you from going deep.
Number two, friendship is ruined when we look for people who are useful to us
for reasons other than friendship itself.
Build links that are based on love and enjoyment of another's company,
(40:14):
not what sheer he can do for you professionally or socially.
Interesting. Number three, too many deep friendships today are spoiled by differences of opinion.
Love for others can be enhanced, not harmed, by differences.
If we elect to show humility instead of pride, then the happiness benefits are enormous.
(40:42):
And last one, the goal for long-term romance is a special kind of friendship, not undying passion.
Companionate love is based on trust and mutual affection.
And what old people who still love each other talk about.
(41:03):
Of course, these are his opinions based on data and research and all the work
that he's done. And these are just kind of what he calls the blissful work of friendship.
And it sounds like to me, Ollie, the friendships that you value and that you
possess and that you contribute towards, these are friendships of authenticity. Authenticity.
(41:30):
These are friendships that I suppose that you have a space to be you and a place
that you can grow with that person in some way, no matter how small or how voluminous.
Would you say that's right? You have very genuine connections to people?
I think that's a result or symptom of time.
(41:55):
I think the people who've managed to put up with my general approach to social justice.
Interaction which is kind of to flip and
be very non-committal about
my relationships the people who i've stuck around are
(42:16):
the ones who mutually or who
have an interest in genuine long-standing relationships
and they can put up with whatever i throw at
them so i've lost some of my best and oldest friends because
i'm just i'm very i i think it took me a long time to realize what friendship
actually should be and what what kind of friends it's important to stick with
(42:40):
but the people who stuck with me despite my kind of confusion are the ones who.
Yeah maybe an analogy is more
helpful here because i've said a lot of words there i once came
up with this phrase and i've never put it anywhere or
maybe it would make a good song lyric but if in
life we could say that the aim is to
(43:03):
burn all your bridges and the
ones that made of stone will stand at the end i think i've i have this like
unintentional subconscious policy of burning all my bridges all the time and
the people who can put up with that treatment i I eventually come around to
saying, hey, I'm really sorry.
(43:23):
I've been quite bad for years.
Thanks for sticking with me. My friend Alex Padanchi, who I mentioned near the
beginning, he's an example of that.
So we go back, way back, and he's a very genuine friend, better than I have been to him or others.
So you said what friendships should be. What should they be then?
(43:49):
I think they need to be about nothing material they need to be about genuine
just love and fascination of the person i've once heard that friendship.
Is defined in five actions that you can take day to day or multiple times a day.
(44:11):
And by taking these actions, or if you observe that somebody is taking these
actions, it means that they are caring and they have a friendship with someone.
So the five actions are something like when you spend quality time with somebody,
when you give someone words
(44:32):
of affirmation when you say thank you to somebody or kind of the opposite or
the converse when you give someone a gift doesn't need to be a big flashy gift
but maybe even just the gift of time or a few words on the birthday and the
fifth one i can't remember
(44:52):
but they are five things that
are like action-based and they're quite simple and if
you think about if i think about friends who
i call people who i call friends but then i challenge myself
when's the last time i spent quality time or got them
a gift or said thank you or gave them words of affirmation and then i realize
(45:13):
it's months and months since i did that i say you know we are what we repeatedly
do am i really a friend to this person and then i kind of take a step back and
say well if i do want to be a friend to this person why am i not doing these things.
And most of the time i do care about these people and i want to be friends but i just forget,
(45:34):
and so i i have to really find ways like whether it's a note-taking app or a
reminder in a calendar or something,
I have to have a daily, weekly practice of reaching out to those people in my
life who I do care about and making sure I take those actions,
because for some reason they don't occur to me naturally.
I think a lot of people are in that boat. They don't think...
(46:00):
We don't have the initiative or the volition to think of others and do right
by others. We need a prompt.
But I think that's fine. That's just a fair little life hack.
And if you just give yourself the prompt, like writing on a sticky note,
say hello to someone today, then that's fine, especially if it helps you maintain
(46:24):
and achieve magical relationships from which you learn how to be a better person.
And I would even go so far as to say, based on what you just said,
sometimes we depend on technology to serve, to act as our way of connecting,
(46:45):
but it can feel really hollow and artificial.
And Arthur C. Brooks says, real friendship requires real contact.
Technology can complement your deepest relationship, but it is a terrible substitute.
Look for more ways to be together in person with the people you love the most.
(47:07):
And of course, I'm not talking about people that are thousands of miles away.
We can't just hop on a plane and go see them. I mean, I understand that.
But in terms of spending time and commitment,
yeah it's i feel like and feel
free to speak to this if you like it's almost like technology
has become this i don't even know what word i i just used artificial means of
(47:37):
communicating with people oh i i did my little you know thumbs up i did my little
like for the day well it doesn't really
mean anything what does it mean anything you
want to say about that yeah for sure the the
digitization of interactions it
(47:58):
not to sound like a luddite or a conspiracy theorist here but the digitization
of social interaction hasn't been done for people it's been done for data gathering Gathering.
Companies who ultimately want to sell
(48:18):
a product to advertisers and the advertisers
need to know who interacts with whom about what topic how often and at what
times of what day so that they can sell things during those times and i think
that that's not a terrible thing i mean i think advertising exists in our world
for a reason and actually has led me to buy or experience things
(48:40):
that i would never have found out about if it wasn't for
these recommender systems existing so i'm
all for technology but i wish
that it was more intuitively obvious
to everyone at the user end that they're kind of being played and by liking
(49:01):
someone's posts you're just feeding a data algorithm you're not actually providing
a human input to the the person who's posts you're liking.
So in addition to liking and commenting and sharing and getting involved digitally
which i think can be really healthy for a lot of people up to a point but in addition to that i think,
(49:26):
meeting up in person is irreplaceable and it's always more than the sum of its
parts as well are, you have to be really kind of cold and dry and formal to
come away from a human interaction,
not having learned something from the other person that you didn't expect to learn.
I think it's almost always the case that we come away from meeting someone in person and,
(49:51):
having grown as people. So finding any excuse and reason to go out and make
eye contact with somebody and sit down with them for one minute,
even that can be all it takes.
And that's the most important thing we can do in our day.
You're on mute. Sorry. We're going to wrap up this part two of this conversation with this comment.
(50:14):
We used to have back to school night where all the parents would come and learn
about the curriculum for the year, field trips, all that stuff.
And I would make it a little unorthodox and get the parents involved at back-to-school
night doing music and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But I would tell all those parents sitting in that room and I would say, you know what?
(50:38):
In addition to supporting your child's school experience this year,
I'm going to challenge all of you to find a connection with children on this
campus that you don't know.
And that starts the minute you walk on this campus, look at a child, say hello to them.
Because just that hello, just that human interaction can mean the world to that
(51:04):
seven, eight, nine, 10 year old person.
And that just speaks to what you were talking about. So I just wanted to share that. Yeah.
Okay. Third part of the conversation. We're going to get into the legs of your work.
And with I want to talk about an album that came out in 2023 it's called Dig
(51:27):
the Mountain and if you could kind of retrace your steps in memory of this album that came out last year,
That's one. And two, I want us to take a listen to a song called Trouble with the Green.
So in putting this album together, Oli, what do you remember?
(51:48):
In 2017, the band broke up and we did a farewell tour.
And at that time, my interaction with music had
become less of the kind of Mandela-inspired love
of dancing and music it had become quite commodified
and music was a business to me i had a
startup company who were doing a concert promotion
(52:10):
that was my story the
other guys all had their individual reasons for wanting out
of stornoway and we all just needed a break
so 2017 we said
goodbye to it all and we ended triumphantly loads
of people came out to the shows and they kept
(52:30):
buying merchandise we said this is the last time you're going to see us so they
wanted to get the farewell t-shirt and the farewell tea towel and we kind of
tied a ribbon around this project and it was obvious to the world that that
was it curtains and we honestly had no intention of getting back together,
But that Christmas, about nine months after we had finished the last performance
(52:56):
on stage, we went and played for a private party, a fan who had been with us since the beginning.
And he's actually on my list of role models, someone who really, every time I meet them.
Fills me with inspiration and so we were
happy to play their private party even though we'd broken up
(53:17):
it was like a favor and a a
small kind of a small event anyway it wasn't like we were getting back together
but something magical happened that evening nine months after we'd broken up
we realized that we still had a love of music and maybe it had taken those nine months to kind of,
(53:40):
forget about all the stresses and strains of the project and say,
well, without the project being a business anymore,
maybe it's okay for it to exist as just a private background thing that we get
together to do once in a while.
And the audience so loved it that the host said, come back again next year.
(54:02):
And then in 2018, they said, come back again next year.
And we You know, over the years, we introduced the odd Christmas cover,
so playing Fairytale of New York.
That's the kind of song that you can't really be in the same room as anyone
else listening to that song and not come out of it, having fallen slightly more
(54:22):
in love with those people.
So by 2021, after four years of playing this same event every year and just
having a real genuine, small-scale human experience, sharing of love, of a 2021.
Brian called me the next morning, pretty much, after that fourth show and said.
(54:47):
There's clearly enough love here that we might want to consider doing our music
more seriously. I want to see you more often.
And it turned out that all of us had been writing music during the pandemic
and the lockdowns. We'd found it to be a very distressing, but also very creatively stimulating time.
So we all brought a bunch of songs to the project. by this
(55:10):
stage it was just me and brian and john so my brother rob no
longer has anything to do with storn away out of his own
choice and we've said we really want to have him back but for
now he wasn't part of this recurring event or
this subsequent conversation about getting back
together got it the first song that
i heard brian bring to the table
(55:31):
and in this new with this new vision that we
might start doing music more seriously was trouble
with the green and it immediately
was a kind of insight for me
into how the pandemic had been for him and for perhaps many other people because
it deals with stress and the jumping around attention wise from topic to topic
(55:55):
and content to content the person the protagonist in the song is a painter who's using different
colors to try and express something of their human story onto a canvas.
And I felt like I'd actually gone through that journey myself.
When he talks about it, he has revealed that it's about an acquaintance of his
who has attention deficit, hyperactive disorder, ADHD.
(56:19):
And so the song is technically a description of their symptoms and their struggles.
But I think it does a really neat job of being.
Technically precise and yet very open to
interpretation a lot of people have asked me whether trouble with
the green means an addiction to marijuana or trouble
(56:40):
with the green being about money so and there
are so many interpretations and i i think because that was the first single
of the album and the first one that i heard demoed in early 2022 it's been with
me through the whole reunification of the band and the re-establishing of a group love of music,
(57:03):
we never thought we'd get back together but this song and this collection of songs.
Made it happen somehow wow see i wish i were still teaching in the classroom
because when i was a teacher i would
look for lyrics metaphors similes personification anything i felt like the
(57:25):
students could really glom onto and not only just appreciate the figurative language,
but also the theme content and the drive behind it.
Red first, red for the sun, brush it up, brush it on thick, see it drip,
drip, dripping down bright red straight from the heart, build it up slow.
(57:46):
The horizon starting to show, you know, and actually, can we take a listen to this song?
Of course. Of course, yeah. Any excuse to hear it again, I'm always happy to.
This is Trouble with the Green by Scorn Away.
Music.
(58:57):
So in hearing this song, it's a real unique song in terms of its textures,
its arrangements, the vocal work.
I feel as though there's a lot of things going on here.
And now that I really understand the backstory, it makes even more sense in
(59:23):
terms of the arrangements. changements.
So lyrically, again, trouble with the green, giving you the blues. I love that line.
Mix it with the white and the colors are bright again.
Trouble with the white led you to the black, puts you in the red,
and you're falling apart again.
So with lyric writing for the band, is this a struggle?
(59:48):
Is this a challenge? I've heard both sides of this.
Does it just the valve open you want to
speak to them well the the sole
lyricist in the band is brian and he has
described to me his process as being sometimes the
words come first and it's the message of
the lyrics that then make it
(01:00:11):
necessary to find some music to support the
lyrics and an example of that would be we are the
battery human because he picked that up that
whole message lyrically from a book by
a colleague of his 20 years ago who works
in conservation and had a specific lecture series that she delivered and that
(01:00:31):
was pretty much the title we are the battery human and he had he had a whole
story to tell to articulate and then the music was kind of the the second stage
of it but But conversely,
a lot of the time, it'll be music that's come from either Brian's guitars,
his kind of jamming at home, or myself or John.
(01:00:53):
We are much more instrumentally driven writers, and we see words most of the
time as an afterthought.
So then Brian comes in and adds his words on top.
And Brian's approach is that the words that he's going to go and record or for
an album or sing on stage, he really needs to be able to feel those words with conviction.
(01:01:15):
So that's why he will always end up being the lyricist.
He might rewrite something even quite substantially so that it's about an experience
he's had and he can sing with conviction.
In other projects of mine, I've known experiences where songwriters are basically
instrumental composers and words come much later as an afterthought.
(01:01:40):
Some of my favourite acts who I think.
Have that might be, let me think. Well, Bon Iver might be a good example of that.
Bon Iver, who was a label mate of ours for a while.
A lot of the time people don't understand what he's actually singing.
And I think I've read that his first album was just Nonsense Sounds.
(01:02:00):
And he later added words to make it kind of at least resemble a song.
But you know, some of the most successful in the music in
the world like bonnie verse can be not about
words at all but just about the sonic experience
and i find that kind of fascinating but
at the other extreme probably my favorite musician
(01:02:23):
of all time is a guy called kevin barnes from a
band called of montreal and his songs are so
so eloquent it's like
they're fully formed not just sentences but
poetic lines and i couldn't
care less what he does musically even though what he does musically is
probably the some of the best music i've ever heard and tried
(01:02:44):
to learn and been inspired by he's an incredible bass
player arranger of strings everything he plays all his own instruments but when
i come back to the lyrics they are like they are just so impressive and so you
there is no single way that works for for music you can be lyrics driven or
music driven and And at the end of the day,
(01:03:06):
whatever works for you as an artist to do honest output,
that people can see what's in your heart, I think that's the most important thing. Oh my goodness.
Nailed it. Absolutely. In transitioning into something that we have talked about
(01:03:26):
in this conversation, the connection to people.
We are the battery human. I'm going to read some lyrics for people.
I'm going to try not to sing it, but in memory of my students,
a phenomenal group of students that year, love these lyrics so much because
(01:03:47):
of what they evoke and the imagery.
Staying inside on this fine day, we'll stare at a screen like every morning.
And outside the window, spring is here. We're going to hibernate all year under
a pile of A4 snowflakes because we're the new generation. We are the battery human.
(01:04:08):
But we were born to be free range.
We've got the hole at our fingers. I mean, this is such wonderful,
sharp, crisp writing metaphorically.
And if a 10-year-old can understand that concept, man, you've got something
powerful there. And that's what that song evoked for us during that school year.
(01:04:32):
And it became such an anthem for us to sing this song all the time. I want to know, Ollie.
I remember telling those students, not just with this song, but other songs
as well, when all of you harmonize, it's fucking glorious.
It's Beach Boys to me.
(01:04:53):
What are your thoughts on that? Thank you. Yeah, it's really rewarding and fulfilling
to hear you recite those lyrics and say that they're eloquent.
And to mention the harmonies, the harmony aspect of Stornoway didn't come into
even a conception of ours until maybe 2007.
(01:05:16):
So we would have been together by about two years by this point.
We were just one singer who
played guitar and then a bass the
drums and then a keyboard cellist guitarist wizard who was john none of us volunteered
to sing until i think i i mentioned that on the demo version of i saw you blink
(01:05:42):
that had been making its rounds through the pubs and venues in Oxford to try and get us some gigs.
There was a second vocal part. So it's the bit that goes, Oh,
Lucy, could you really be the one that I've been waiting for?
And I said, I don't know if we've got plans for that thing one day,
(01:06:03):
but should I just kind of do a placeholder?
I just sing it along when we're playing it. And Brian said, Oh,
I thought none of you would ever ask I've been waiting for one of you to volunteer
to do that backing vocal and,
then I start so I started singing it and then I
think we decided to add Rob my brother and
he was singing the same part but then he split onto a different harmonic line
(01:06:25):
in the choruses and later John added his line added another line but until we
had constructed that whole four-part harmony for that song we'd We'd never seen
ourselves as a harmony band, a vocal harmony band.
But as soon as we'd done that one, Zorbing came along.
Brian wrote Zorbing, and that very clearly has rich vocal harmony.
(01:06:48):
It's like the whoa that distinguishes it from verse to chorus.
And other than that, there's no change to indicate verse to chorus.
There's a slight melodic change in the lead vocal.
So what I'm saying is we've grown organically and developed our identity as
a harmony band, a choral harmony band.
(01:07:10):
We never set out to be like that.
And it's been quite the adventure because in the early days, we probably,
on the record you hear of Battery Human on the Beachcombers album,
Beachcombers' Windowsill album, them that's probably a mix
of the 75th take and
(01:07:30):
the 301st take and the 297th take
we we'd spent like a whole weekend singing
that song over and over and over and in the
course of those takes we worked out how to sing
in unison which is really tough it's surprisingly
tough and then how to really break apart our
harmonies in an effective way that suited our different ranges
(01:07:53):
and on different timbres and then the end result
i think the final clicking together of stornoway's harmonies
was when we put out get low because that song has all four vocalists being very
prominent the whole time and we're all in harmony the whole time so it's polyphony
and it took us because of get low comes out in 2015 we'd been together for 10 years fully 10 years,
(01:08:18):
that's how long it took for us to find our feet to find our voices properly
I could spend hours talking about your work, and you're providing such little nuggets of gold here.
You know what? I want to take this time and say thank you. And I'm going to
say it in a way based on this book.
(01:08:38):
This is called Daring Greatly, written by Brene Brown.
This is about how the The Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead.
And in this chapter, she talks about the vulnerability armory that we wear.
And we're so scared to step out of our comfort zones because of fear of rejection. You know all this.
(01:09:05):
But I'm going to say thank you to your band because going back memory lane with
those students, I remember getting up there singing with the boys and in acapella.
And I'm only a teacher. I'm not a music teacher.
I don't know all the lingo and the phrases that one would need,
(01:09:27):
but who cares? We were having a blast.
And so I let down my guard and I sang with those boys and girls at times multiple
times through your music because of your music and I just wanted to say thank
you and I I'm glad I have this opportunity to do that.
(01:09:51):
And I think if I were to ever speak to those students again from that time period,
they're all, you know, they're grown up now. They're probably out of college.
I bet you I can put on that song and they would pick up and just start singing it. So there you go.
That's great to know. So it's left an impact on them and on you.
(01:10:14):
And I think, you know, the funny thing is, even though I'm in the band,
it took 15 years for me to feel the impact of We Are The Battery Human,
that song, because I think I have had to have my own kind of adventures in relation
to mental health, nature, getting outside,
(01:10:35):
reconnecting with people, these different like compass points,
cardinal points of that song's message.
As a 20-year-old, when Brian brought that very mature, wise song into our repertoire,
I hadn't had my adventures yet to understand that song.
But these days, I always refer to that as the song that most directly and fully
(01:11:00):
captures Stornoway's message,
because I've learned over the course of almost 20 years with the band that that's
the song that is most about life and how life relates to nature,
music, and social interaction.
Direction so and it all goes all the way through our catalog i've realized mental
well-being and how it relates to creativity and the great outdoors from we are
(01:11:25):
the battery human through to trouble with the green and excelsior these are
other songs from the latest album.
They're about zooming out to see the bigger picture and realizing that you're
part of something much greater than one person's life or one person's screen
that they're looking at for their job or one person's small role in society.
(01:11:50):
We're all part of something much bigger. And I think, yeah, those are the songs
that really deliver that message.
Could you tell us what's coming down the line for the band in 2024?
It's going to happen before the episode comes out i guess so i'll mention
the other ones as well we've got love trails festival which is
an endurance running and music festival so as
(01:12:12):
part of our performance there i'm going to lead a 10 kilometer six mile run
around the gawa peninsula going to look at rare bird habitats and then a couple
of hours later i'll be on stage playing the headline slot at the festival so
that's going to be a wacky weekend by the way love trails is is coming to California
in, I think, later this year.
So there might be a tie-in there.
(01:12:35):
If you mentioned them in the show notes or something, they might take an interest
in the episode. So maybe I'll just succinctly say that.
Look out for Love Trails California because their first episode of that new
festival is happening sometime later this year.
Then I should mention the, yeah, Yeah, there's two August festivals.
(01:12:59):
The one I'm really excited about is Greenbelt Festival in Kettering,
which is kind of middle England.
It's just getting out into the great outdoors. It's a very spiritual festival,
and they've got some great acts in the lineup.
And then we're kind of knuckling down to writing new music for a new album.
And that might be two years away, but we're going to be very,
(01:13:22):
very busy in the coming months, sowing the seeds of new inspiration and gathering
threads from the natural world
around us and bringing them into the studio to create some more music.
Are you all hearing this, listeners? Because this is some really good stuff
coming up for people that can go out and participate.
And if you can't, check out all their music, Spotify, Bandcamp.
(01:13:44):
Head on over to Facebook, Instagram.
Ollie's got a great Instagram page filled, replete, impregnated with nature.
And really cool images and video. And very personable.
I want to wrap up this conversation with a little bit of
fun fun this is where I just toss out
(01:14:07):
some things that come to mind and you just share with the listeners what comes
to your mind when I say these things so it's just a little think of it like
the lightning round got it got it okay here Here we go, Oli. California.
Sunshine. New York. Misery. Pizza or Thai food? A choice between them.
(01:14:33):
So I would go for pizza every time.
Ocean or land? Ocean. Flying or driving? Flying.
George, Paul, Ringo or John?
I think it's George. An album that you feel is underappreciated.
(01:14:55):
Well, I think Skeletal Lamping by Elf Montreal.
A current swear word you enjoy saying.
I use fig. Fig, yeah, figging.
Sounds good to me. The name of a book you last read. The Mirror and the Light.
(01:15:17):
South Africa. Maskandi. It's the name of a traditional folk guitar style,
and I think it captures the whole spirit of the country.
Positive and negative, good and bad, solo and group, stay-at-home and adventure.
Everything's in that one genre, and you can play it as a solo or in a whole band.
(01:15:43):
Okay, great. A flaw of yours that gets you into trouble.
Telling Little White Lies. A trait of yours that you're very proud of?
Improvisational musicality. Favorite day of the week? Tuesday. Coffee or tea?
Decaf coffee. Guitar or bass? Guitar.
(01:16:04):
Is your bed made? Yeah. Fatherhood? Fun. Stornoway?
Precious. Who is Olly Stedman? Well that's a question that Dean Curtis taught me to ask.
Who are you? Who are you? You have to ask yourself that question every morning.
I really struggle with that one, but at the moment I would say.
(01:16:30):
South African multi-instrumentalist triathlete. Thank you so much Olly Stedman
for participating in Surprise Cast.
Thank you to all the listeners for listening to this special feature.
Again, you can check out Stornoway's work all online.
Look for those dates, enjoy the music, pay attention to those lyrics.
(01:16:54):
I'm very grateful and honored to have this
conversation with the a gentleman that is acutely
aware of his role in this
crazy thing we call life and is
offering up all these little gifts along the way for us to enjoy so thank you
thanks so much for having me william it's been a pleasure and i think like we
(01:17:18):
said earlier about human interactions so you've taught me a lot through this
conversation more than i expected to learn and i think it's been more than the sum of its parts.
So thank you. Those are very nice words.
Take care, everyone. My name is W, host of the High Arts on the Edge page, host of Surprise Cast.
(01:17:39):
And remember, great music is all around us.
We just have to keep our ears open.
Music.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.