Irish indie legends Stoat have used the ongoing lockdown to get more philosophical. Like a lot of their last album, ‘Why You Should Give Up On Your Dreams’ is a thoughtful and reflective slice of midlife male psyche delivered with a sprightly tone and a large dose of musical invention. It sounds homemade because it is homemade with Cormac Parle editing together a tune that was “recorded bit by bit in our homes while Ireland was locked down for the COVID-19 pandemic, and painstakingly pieced together”.

Press release is below and it’s well worth watching the video. It’s like an existentialist TED talk.

Ok ok ok ... so the subject matter of this song is quite dear to my heart. The whole "follow your dreams" thing is, IMO, a load of bollocks, and for me at least has led to the waste of a huge amount of time and effort trying to manifest a story I had made up in my head. Instead of, like, actually enjoying my life as it's happening.

Me and John actually spent a couple of years working on a kind of anti-self-help book about this but, naturally, nobody was interested in publishing it, so the book got distilled into this song, plus a 5-minute talk that you can find here

https://stoat.bandcamp.com/track/why-you-should-give-up-on-your-dreams