Crywank

I've known about Mancunian 'anti-folk' band Crywank for a while now. I added one of their songs, 'Welcome to Castle Irwell', to my Spotify favourites playlist in June of 2017, so that's at least 18 months. It was in fact Spotify that had introduced the two of us - its ingenious algorithm correctly predicted that I would enjoy the music of an artist who elected to call themselves 'Crywank' and played sad acoustic songs. In case the sarcasm wasn't evident - I don't think this says a whole lot about Spotify's machine learning endeavours. Anybody who had both met me and become aware of the band would undoubtedly see that we are a match made in heaven.

The point that I am gently meandering towards, is that this week I learned something pretty neat about them. They were formed originally as a solo project by James Clayton in 2009, despite the fact that he didn't know how to play guitar. He decided to form Crywank on the same night he learned his first two chords, and 'Welcome to Castle Irwell' uses just those two chords. Its simplicity perfectly compliments the visceral emotion of the vocals. If there were any more than two chords, I don't think it would have the same effect.

The cool thing about this story is that Clayton did exactly the opposite of what I would have done, and what I suspect many other people would have done too. Upon learning my first two chords and deciding I wanted to be in a band, I would've thought to myself 'I'll start looking for people to play with when I'm better at guitar'. Then when I was better at guitar, I would probably want to wait until I had improved even further. Assuming at some point I did eventually become involved in a band, I'd probably want us to build on our repertoire before playing gigs or beginning the process of recording an album. I would inevitably constantly shift the goalposts so that I would never actually experience the satisfaction or reaching my target. Clayton and Crywank demonstrated perfectly how stupid that was - Welcome to Castle Irwell has a million streams on Spotify. He wasn't interested in potentially doing something at some unspecified point in the future, he was interested in doing something now.

I do this a lot with my own happiness and sense of self worth. I think that I will be 'good enough' when I weigh a certain amount, can squat a certain amount, learn a certain programming language, have a certain amount of money, whatever it is. And every time I get there, I want more. I'm not satisfied with exactly the thing that I was previously convinced would bring me satisfaction. It's fucking stupid, and I need to stop.

I think there's a lot I could learn from the band's origin story. Maybe I'll start a Crywank cover band.