Is it still an album if you don’t release it as a physical product?

Anyway. Here’s our most recent music collated in handy playlist form: HAVR – No-One Jumps On Rainy Days.

As I wrote on Soundcloud:

This is the final song from the album we’ve been uploading in dribs and drabs. I still haven’t come up with a title for it, and we’re nearly done writing the next one. Oops.

New Normal is a song about heavy sadness: what if everybody feels the same and we’re too scared to say it? Musically I can hear R.E.M., Gin Blossoms (especially “Hey Jealousy”, one of my very favourite songs) and the big guitars of early Suede, and vocally I’m definitely trying and failing to be R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe.

In this modern and exciting social media age it’s very difficult to share this kind of thing: the last time I posted a link to our music on Facebook it was shown to exactly two people, because Facebook hides any content it thinks it can sell as an advert. So if you like this or any of our other songs I’d appreciate it if you could share it with others. Thanks.

The first time I heard John Grant, I burst into tears.

People who know me won’t find that remarkable, because I burst into tears a lot. Long before I became the hormonal mess I am today, music often made me blub. But this was unusual, because it was – terrible pun alert – blub at first sight.

I was at a gig to see Elbow, and Grant was the support. I knew nothing about him, had never heard him, and he was playing this; many of the same visuals appeared on the screens above him.

I was in bits. It’s a beautiful song (and better still live), and it’s particularly powerful if you’re LGBT.

Jon Savage describes it in this wonderful profile for Esquire:

This range of sweet and sour, deep and dark emotions set against appealing melodies is what characterises Grant as a major talent. On “Glacier”, from Pale Green Ghosts, you can hear the emotions frozen by fear and self-hatred crack into righteous anger. Grant passes through the shock of people saying things “that sting and leave you wincing” to the refrain: “Don’t you pay them fuckers as they say no never mind/ They don’t give two shits about you/ It’s the blind leading the blind

The whole thing’s well worth reading. Glacier made me an instant fan, and I’ve since been seen blubbing away at the Edinburgh Festival gigs Savage refers to in the piece.

Grant’s a fascinating musician, both from a fan’s perspective and a musician’s perspective. While his music is becoming increasingly electronic (and oh man, you have to hear the punch of Pale Green Ghosts through a massive PA system before you die) a lot of his songs are very close to 1970s soft rock of the Elton John variety, and I mean that as a huge compliment: the melodies and arrangements are masterful. I’m currently trying to learn to play Caramel, which is one of my very favourite things in the whole universe (and I’m delighted that my long-suffering piano tutor has fallen in love with it too: as I play it badly she can go to her happy place where JG plays it properly).

Here’s a live version from the BBC.

Great, isn’t it? I love pretty much everything about this song, but in particular the chord change to A flat as he sings “he hits me with tiger eyes”. It’s a staggeringly beautiful musical moment and it has me on the brink of tears every single time. If you don’t like it we can’t be friends.

I think John Grant has a lot in common with one of my other musical loves, Mark Everett from Eels, and not just because I’m learning to play Eels’ It’s A Motherfucker too.

Both men aren’t afraid of adult-oriented rock; both men write often hilarious lyrics; both men take often harrowing experiences and subjects and turn them into truly transcendent music.

I cry at Eels gigs too.

This is the penultimate upload from the album we haven’t actually got a title for yet. It’s called Your Love Is Not Enough and it’s a typically bleak slab of minimalist electronic pop.

We’re available for children’s parties and other celebratory events.

Morrissey has cancelled his UK and Ireland tour citing “logistical problems”. Various well-informed sources say those problems are of the “persuading people to buy tickets” variety.  In one Scots venue with a capacity of 2,900, I’m told, he barely sold 400 tickets after weeks on sale.

In the last six years, Morrissey has cancelled 134 shows. Between that, poor record sales and increasingly divisive on-stage banter, it’s a miracle he managed to persuade anyone to buy tickets at all.

Same Star is another of David’s compositions and another vocal where I appear to be channelling E from Eels, which of course is never a bad thing. It’s a musical version of the Scots phrase “we’re a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns”: we have much more in common than what divides us, and we’re all busking it. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “We are here to help each other through this thing, whatever it is.”

A Hollow Victory was one of the first songs David and I wrote for the current crop of music, but it took a while to get right: the superbly retro electro stomp was there from the outset but it took a bit of fiddling to find a version we both liked.

It’s a companion piece to Barren Ground, written earlier but set later: it’s about how you feel when you’ve been thrown under a bus that promptly crashed into a wall: what you said would happen happened, but there’s no schadenfreude: being proved right is a hollow victory in a war you didn’t want to fight.

This is Pushing Air, a song about sound and fury signifying nothing. Ironically, it started off as sound and fury: I love noisy guitar rock and that tends to be my go-to for songwriting, but sometimes you need a stiletto, not a blunderbuss. This is a stiletto, written during a time when I really needed help and help didn’t come.

This is another one for which David wrote pretty much all the music (the quiet strings from the second verse are mine). There’s something really dysfunctional about it, deliberately so: the timing of the main keyboard part has a great tension to it, which really makes the song.

It’s another really close-miked vocal, and again it’s designed to be almost uncomfortably intimate because that’s what the song’s about: me as the elephant in every room, the thing you wish wasn’t there.

I wrote it about the period after I’d come out as trans, but it’s just as relevant to anyone who’s faced challenges or sadnesses: sometimes you’re going through something that other people just can’t cope with, not because they’re bad people but because they don’t want to put their metaphorical foot in it. So the conversations you’re included in avoid the elephant in the room, but you overhear the ones that do through the “doors ajar” I mention in the lyric.