1. Things fall apart...

Welcome to the journey

Author

Richard Walley
May 18, 2024

… Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold …

Welcome! I honestly didn’t think this first email would start with poetry, but as I reflected on what to write, this quote from Yeats just kept nagging at me. So here it is.

A quick note on what we’re doing here

The gizmo above is the first single from the debut album from The Sixteenth. The album - entitled You Could Be Happy - will be released one track at a time over the next fifteen weeks or so. It’s being released like that because it tells a story, and I decided that it’d be fun to serialise the story, like Dickens, or a comic. The idea of these emails is to tell you a bit more of that story.

There is a voice…

This track begins with a cry. For help, maybe, or of despair, or dread, but it is definitely not happy. And then before it really has a chance to be heard, after a tiny empty space of silence, the world starts winding up and speeding up and taking over and before we know it, we’re on a journey we can’t control. Until it falls apart. And the wheels really come off this time. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. This is a track about panic, stress, anxiety, and about losing control.

One trick to understanding this album is that a lot of the sounds mean something. That sound of a cry for help that you hear at the start of the track will come back later in the album; I’ll talk a bit more then about exactly what it means.

If you’ve listened to the track, you might be thinking ‘well yes… but parts of it sound… happy..?’. Or maybe kind of exhilarating? And you’d be right. Because sometimes it’s fun to be running around with your backside on fire smashing one job and then another job and then something else and it’d just stuff stuff stuff stuffstuffstuffstuffstuffstuffstuffstuffstuffstuff and then the wheels fall off. And then something worse happens. We’ll find out more about that in a couple of weeks.

Some of the music tries to capture that duality of feeling massively stressed but also occasionally winning in that environment. There are a couple of ‘drive off a cliff’ moments, where we seem to be flying, and succeeding, and maybe giving ourselves time to remember that there’s something better, before we realise that we’re just standing in a cloud like Wile E Coyote.

In terms of the music itself, I chose to start the album with this song partly because it’s a good way of starting the story. Bang! It’s a ‘sit up and pay attention’ track. But also it was one of the first tracks that really came together easily and quickly when I was writing it. I’m not sure why. Some tracks are just easy, and others aren’t. This one just slotted right together with only a couple of hours’ work, and told me what it wanted to be very quickly.

Finally, you’ll hear fragments of some of my musical heroes throughout this album. For this track, the obvious jumping off points are Hans Zimmer and Amon Tobin. If you haven’t come across either of them, definitely check them out. But also, to come full circle, I hope there’s a ghost of one of the best opening tracks of any album ever; ‘Table of Contents’ from The Roots’ epic album ‘Things Fall Apart’. I’ll also be talking about more of my influences as we go through these releases.

What next?

Glad you asked! Firstly, thanks for reading this far. You’ve already been part of the creative journey of this album by getting to this bottom bit of the email, and I sincerely thank you for paying attention. All I’d really like is for people to listen and be part of the journey. Job done. However, if you have friends or people you think would enjoy this, please encourage them to sign up to these updates via www.thesixteenth.net. It would mean a lot. And maybe actually listen to the songs in whatever way you enjoy!