Duncan McCartney – Take Me Away
People who only win will never make a great record, or write a good book. They might have plenty of interesting advice about how to have a similarly successful life. But, they most certainly do not have a story to share.
The fact is that stories can’t simply shoot from bad to incredible and stay that way forever. That’s not a fairytale! That’s a sentence! Without things oscillating, and without the main characters fighting to maintain or regain their glory, there’s no story.
People don’t just need the story in order to lead a happy life. They also need the song with which to drive out into the sunset. That part, at least, cannot be replaced. When you hear a song that touches your soul, you’re destined to want to hold it with you through the best, or the most difficult moments of your life.
Duncan McCartney’s “Take Me Away” is heroic guitar-pop. It’s heroic not simply because of the vibe that recalls groups like Oasis. It’s heroic because it stares defeat straight in the face and refuses to accept it. “Take Me Away” is a song about squandering opportunities, failing miserably, and coming back to rewrite the story. That’s the kind of story that ordinary people sure can understand.
Chris Aggabao – Blue Collar Life
We all consume pop-rock music. Yes, there was a time when we got by without it. But, by the same token, there was a moment when nobody outside of Latin America had the luxury of enjoying a nice cup of coffee in the morning. Those are dark times and nobody wants to return to them. Try to get all of the caffeine addicts of the world to agree to let go of their habit and you’ll have bloody riots in the streets.
But who makes the pop-rock music that we are equally addicted to? Is it people that we can trust and who understand our common problems just as well as we do? We’d like to think that we can trust them, sure.
However, recent analysis has shown that, for example, in the United Kingdom, the vast majority of musicians, actors, and all other artists, are privately educated kids born with a silver spoon in their mouths. Is it them who we need to learn to trust?
Taking an inspiration from the carefully-tailored, well-structured 80s radio pop-rock, Chris Aggabao’s “Blue Collar Life” aims to be an anthem for working-class people doing their best not just to get by, but excel. Aggabao tries to prove, and succeeds in convincing us that the best music isn’t necessarily made in some fancy recording studio in the Hollywood Hills. Our pop-rock is a living, breathing thing. And we need people like Aggabao talking about the things that we can understand and the problems that we can sympathise with.
