At some point — I don't know what may have been said to trigger it — I stepped out of myself for a moment and recognized the wonderful strangeness of the situation in which I found myself. 

I was sitting having tea with Gregory Webster, who, as one-half of the band Razorcuts, sang and co-wrote some of my favourite music of the 1980s. Gregory had become a semi-regular visitor to my former home of Vancouver from his home in Oxford, England, so the infrequent correspondence we'd been maintaining for several years had suddenly granted me, on two occasions thus far, the opportunity to have lunch with the man.

 It was strange not because I felt like a fan holding court with his hero; I'm too old, and have met far too many musicians, to be swept up in adulatory awe (although I can still clearly remember listening almost daily to Razorcuts' Storyteller album as a 19-year-old, which is as good a teenage memory as any I have). It was strange because their music, like the music of so many bands I listened to then, was created in — and received with — what felt like such obscurity that it never occured to me it would still have resonance in my (or anyone else's) life almost 20 years later. Their gentle, romantic, exceedingly hopeful-sounding music seemed  to me to come from another planet, and seemed so unpopular (although I later found that was not the case) that I expected it to disappear as quickly and mysteriously as it had arrived. Perhaps its makers didn't actually exist.



But, of course, Gregory very much exists, and is still occasionally making great music (in the early 2000s with Sportique, and most recently under his own name), and was very kind to listen to me talk incessantly, like I do whenever I have an indulgent audience. And it was during that largely one-way conversation that I told him I don't write very much anymore, partly because my job as an editor means I spend too much of my time honing other people's writing, but more because the nature of the music press nowadays means no one wants to publish features — or even reviews — about the bands I'm most interested in. I plan to start a blog, I told him, because no one else is going to give me a decent forum, and as well as wanting to share my enthusiasm with others, I want the opportunity to actually talk to the people who make the music that excites me. I assume them to be nice, interesting people who know how to give good conversation, and there are few things I love more than good conversation.



Hence, the Music is Love blog.

 Yes, I'm probably setting myself up for some ridicule with that name, or at least some misunderstanding. Yes, it's the name of a David Crosby song (a good one), but I didn't choose it for that reason. More than the song itself, I've always loved the sentiment of the title: it's earnest and baldly romantic and, thus, very unfashionable. But while so many other music journalists (and a good deal of the bands they champion) tie themselves in knots to not seem deeply emotionally invested in the art form from which they strive to make a living, I prefer to project total devotion. I am completely, hopelessly, slavishly in love with music, and if my purpose as a journalist isn't to communicate the depth and breadth and complexity of that love, I don't know what reason there is for doing this.



So, yes: Music is Love.

 And off we go.