In an attempt to create something beautiful

The texts, emails and experiments that lead to Lorde & Jamie xx playing music in my house.

For the most part, music media and content are pretty ugly. I’m guilty of contributing to that circus. Was it ever not? Perhaps it was prettier when we used to read in order to discover new music. What a concept.

But with blogs, listicles and now short-form vertical videos - music discovery has been conveniently shrunk down and shrink wrapped into pocketable Pokémon booster pack-style bites, chock full of memes, rapid-fire recs and the odd shiny Charizard.

Personally, I’ve both benefited from this new form of music media, and struggled with it. Music, something so sacred to me that I hosted hundreds of radio show episodes for hardly anyone to hear, quickly became the thing I built my career on...reaching millions of eyeballs every month. I began to question: should something this sacred to me become something I flog for views? Honestly, it scared me.

So today, I invite you inside my mental gymnasium - a place where I wrestle with a passion project that became a career, and led me somewhere unexpected. Somewhere beautiful.

Hey! It’s Derrick. This is not a newsletter to get you to sign up to anything - it’s a thought process I’ve been going through that I thought was worth sharing.

PLUS - at the end you’ll find little hint of the upcoming Solid Air guest. Drop a comment and take a guess who it is!

Mr. xx

I’m not going to start this story way back in January 2022, when I posted my first TikTok¹ and quickly gained a following for both my interest in hifi and my obsession with music.

Instead, this story starts in August 2023, when I launched a weekly video radio show on Patreon² called Solid Air - an evolution of my eleven year old weekly radio show Finetooth Radio, but in video form. A home-brewed radio show for the modern age (i.e in 4K), every week I iterated Solid Air - adding more cameras, a record player and interactive segments.

Then, one week last November, both XL Recordings UK and XL’s Australian rep reached out, and shifted the course of my “content creation” career forever. An email excerpt:

“We will have on-ground time with Jamie xx during his Australian tour in December. He’s available in Sydney on Monday 9th December if you’d be interested in teeing up a chat.”

A chat…a chat…what would be my version of a chat? My response: “why doesn’t he come over and join the show in my office? Tell him to bring his USB”.

Ok wait wait wait. I’m getting ahead of myself.

The audacity to invite an artist into my home, the same artist who was booked to perform to five thousand people in a warehouse that same day, wasn’t some delusional request of an internet influencer. It was actually a perfectly timed opportunity to further beta-test an instinct I’d had for a while. Let me explain:

Ugly Pretty

Unlike many shows, I like to experiment out in the open. Now, I don’t call them experiments publicly - but before I can fully commit to anything, I need proof. Proof that I like the idea, proof that I find it compelling, proof that there’s some longevity in it, proof that it’s original, proof that it’s me, and proof that it works.

Some experiments I’ve tried over the years:

• A weekly one-man podcast (2022-23, 52 episodes)³

• An interview series with some of the most interesting figures in music (2024, 10 episodes)⁴

• A festival “music journalist with a mic”(2024)⁵

To a greater or lesser extent, these were all fine pieces of “content”. But I wasn’t convinced that I was bringing anything uniquely me to the table, but rather a lesser example of things I’d seen in the past. So I dug deeper.

The Erika de Casier Interview

In search of a show closer to a true expression of me, when offered the opportunity to interview Danish artist Erika de Casier, here’s what I pitched to her manager via Instagram DM:

“What I had in mind was to simply hang out and ask questions - friendly and in my manner. I don’t do lists or quizzes, I’m just a fan that wants to hear more about Erika. Nothing formal. The ideal setting would be somewhere not staged, a park or something.”

“Why can’t it just be a hang?” I thought. No questions, no premise, no format, just two people, talking.

So - one mild afternoon in August, Erika and I walked from her hotel to a local park and we ate cake and talked. It was literally just the two of us, two cameras and some lunch-time runners circling the oval.

The St. Vincent Interview

That November, I was asked if I wanted to fly down and interview St. Vincent in Melbourne. Buoyed by my Erika interview, I pitched an evolved experiment.

I called it "talking over music" in my head. The idea of playing music and talking while it was playing felt thrilling to me. We all do it with friends, so why can’t my interview be that also?

A favourite quote comes from a friend of mine in this vlog⁶, where he said:

“I feel like every time you do something, it’s for the first time”

HA. It’s true. So - I flew down to Melbourne with a bluetooth speaker, two cameras, and a light, and talked over music with St. Vincent - the first time I’d ever done something of that nature. It felt…closer. Closer to what I was searching for. What exactly was I searching for? A genuine connection over music - rather than a journalistic pursuit for the best, most well researched questions. I’m not your guy for that.

I can see your socks

That live experimentation all lead to welcoming Jamie xx in my office less than a month later. My audacious request of “why doesn’t he come over” was a direct result of trialling new forms of music conversations in real time. I liked talking over music - that was the insight.

And as a strictly “shoes off” household, over the following months I welcomed into my home the socks of XL Recordings’ Richard Russell, Dutch DJ Jyoty, English composer Max Richter and North Carolina’s MJ Lenderman.

All of whom I admire greatly — and all of whom took the time to prepare songs and travel to my house to listen to music for an hour. Richard Russell told a mutual friend that it was his favourite stop on his global press tour. Jamie told me that the show inspired him.

Had I found what I was searching for? Almost. A combination of talking over music, hanging out as “regular people”, a space where I can make people feel comfortable and share music with them - felt like something I could bring all of me to, rather than trying to be someone else I’d seen before. Come to think of it, I bet not having shoes on really helps that comfortability in an interview setting.

But…there was a problem.

My home office was too small. I couldn’t move an inch without hitting a camera lens, nor could I keep my office door closed as it resulted in blocking airflow from my AC unit (apologies Max Richter). As the ever-present beacon of clarity, one day my wife said: “Why don’t you film it out in the main room?”

Oh Lorde

Filming it out in the main room was both a simple but brilliant idea, and a whole new daunting undertaking. To leave the confines of my little office meant moving all my equipment out for each shoot, re-setting it, creating a huge mess in my own house, only to pack it down and re-set it in my office for a livestream the next day.

But it was the right next step, the show needed to grow up. Serendipitously, at the same time that this decision was made, I was gifted three new cameras, which brought a whole new level of quality to the show. So from March to May, I upskilled myself in all these things I had no idea about - full frame sensors, open gate, Blackmagic RAW, patch bays, 2.5GHz vs 5GHz, and prepared for my first guest in the new room…who cancelled on me an hour before I was set to record!!! A blessing in disguise it turned out, as it was a dry run for an email I soon received from Universal Music:

“Lorde?”

A new room, more cameras, wireless mics, a Kiwi pop star, talking over music. The episode with Lorde became an internal challenge to myself. If someone who is capable of selling out arenas globally is willing to come over to my humble home (as one of her three "press stops" in the country), what was I willing to do to meet her on her level?

“What I want is for it to be beautiful”

Following the successful shoot with Ella (aka Lorde), having dumped the files onto a hard drive and uploaded them for my editor Jason to start cutting, I sent him this text:

You see, as I reviewed the raw files, something emerged that I hadn’t expected. Perhaps it was the filmic quality of the cameras, or the intensity of the solo shots. Perhaps it was the new room. Perhaps it was the now signature “hallway shot”. The show suddenly felt different than it ever had before. It had morphed from two lads exchanging songs in my office, into a very real and very vulnerable exchange between two people hoping the other would like their song choices.

All of a sudden, I was in search of “beauty”. Which I’d define as an intimacy, an effortlessness, a charm, a magic, a feeling, a dance, as well as a general visual prettiness. All my experimentation led up to this point, and when it arrived, it asked me to meet it where it had grown to.

I think this text sums it up best:

And the promo in question:

gee_derrick

A post shared by @gee_derrick

Love is funny, or it's sad
Love is quiet, or it's mad
It's a good thing, or it's bad
But beautiful
Beautiful to take a chance
And if you fall, you fall
And I'm thinking
I wouldn't mind at all

— But Beautiful, 1947. Lyrics by Johnny Burke, perfectly sung by Billie Holiday

The end, for now.

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Ps. Guess my next guest!

On the left: me and my trusty grey socks
On the right: …?

Footnotes:

1. My first ever video

2. Derrick Gee’s Private Listening Club

3. Speaks volumes Podcast Season 1

4. Speaks Volumes Podcast Season 2

5. Derrick Gee - festival reporter

6. Vlog