From EP Theater, Jay Eddy’s Driving in Circles is an electronic art-pop road trip of a show. We asked Eddy to compile a playlist that gives us an idea of what it sounds like to drive away from trauma and towards a fresh start.
Garbage – Only Happy When it Rains
The perfect song for any angry, maladjusted, suburban teen with a kitchen sink dye job to scream-sing on the six minute drive to school in the morning. Let’s start here.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – The Lyre of Orpheus
For anyone who’s ever been asked to keep an impossible secret, to stop their song in their throat, to shut their silly, stupid, pretty, little mouth, here’s a song to help you speak, sing, scream the damn thing anyway, even if it makes your family’s eyeballs explode.
Donna Summer – I Feel Love
The ‘70s Moog synth, the punchy disco kick, the light-as-air ethereal vocals of Our Queen of Sighs and Moans and High Notes – I’m no Donna Summer, but I’m here to get the sick shit that’s been stuck on a loop in my head for years stuck in yours. You’re welcome.
Björk – Human Behavior
Have you ever felt like an alien analysing the Earthlings’ signals and trying to establish friendly relations – or maybe less an alien xenolinguist and more a medium-sophisticated AI eating up the human’s raw data and running it through the not-exactly-neural network and trying to spit out the correct response, the right answer, the thing the human wants to hear? Yeah. That’s what I do when I’m supposed to be listening, too.
Bill Withers – Use Me
Are you a lonely little cutie with a rock-bottom sense of self-worth? Let’s hang out for, let’s say, 105 minutes at 13:30 at Gilded Balloon every day except Tuesdays. I invited the ghost of Bill Withers, he’s a maybe.
Rilo Kiley – A Better Son/Daughter
This song will sink you into a colourless death-gripped depression and then launch you back out like a bottle rocket – weeping, wailing, scream-singing again – with a burning will to live in this technicolor world you nearly gave up on. Sometimes you need that.
Bruce Springsteen – Hello Sunshine
A milder, more plaintive, more peaceful take on waking up from a dark spell – for the gentle souls, with, presumably, less interesting mothers.
Courtney Barnett – Depreston
This show is, in the end and against all odds, a love story. So this one goes out to the lovebirds – especially the ones who thought the right partner, the right house, the right half-a-million might finally fix you, and it didn’t (well, let’s wait and see on that half-a-million), but you keep on loving your person anyway.
Paul Simon – Graceland
Probably the most beautiful song ever written about a broken marriage inspired me to write probably the most beautiful song ever written about a broken air conditioner. And it’s the perfect road trip song, so we couldn’t finish this car ride without it.
Maria Bamford – Depression
‘I never really thought of myself as depressed as much as paralysed by hope’ – look, it’s not a song, but I wrote it into one because this is the refrain that’s been stamped on my heart since I was a lonely college (American for ‘uni’) kid sitting on a too-long, too-narrow, concrete dorm bed desperate for connection, laughing so hard at this bit I nearly cracked a rib, and feeling a little less alone on the planet knowing Maria Bamford’s on it too.
Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues
It’s two songs stacked feet-on-shoulders and wearing a trench coat – the last number in my show is at least three, but, hey, it’s not a competition. This is another one that just makes me feel a little lighter in this heavy human world. And that’s how I hope you’ll feel at the end of Driving in Circles.
Driving in Circles, Gilded Balloon at Appleton Tower, 30 Jul-24 Aug (not 19), 1.30pm