So did I not listen to any music recently? In fact I did. I listened to this new The Lucksmiths compilation, Spring a Leak. And then I listened to it again. And again. And again. And after a while, when I knew all the songs by heart, but still wanted to hear more, I started digging through their back catalog.

And then I tried to grasp the essence of my current affair with the Lucksmiths in a blog post, which only resulted in a number of unfinished drafts still lying around here. Because it hardly has to do with the compilation itself, superb as it might be. It’s just that music has stopped being my way of being who I am or my way of making friends, but rather has become a way of taking me through the happy and sad times of my life. The Lucksmiths, who have managed to brilliantly catch this kind of everydayness into songs, are the ideal soundtrack for that. I kind of knew that already, I just needed to hear 45 songs –new tunes and ten year old ones, live versions and rare covers– of the bands music to realise it.

I had stopped having ‘best bands ever’ more than five years ago, but I’ve decided to undo that decision. Bands haven’t meant so much to me in a long while, if at all. The mere thought that there is a band like the Lucksmiths puts a smile on my face and makes me love life a little bit more.

Spring a Leak came out on Lost and Lonesome in the band’s home country Australia and on Matinée in the rest of the world. You might like to know that Bradley’s Almanac has put a full live show, as played in Cambridge, Massachusetts recently, online, while Nancy has some songs of a 2002 radio session. It was Nancy who had me sent this cd –in exchange for some football magazines– and she probably doesn’t know how happy she made me.