When you load up Spotify, a great big chunk of the time you can’t think what to play, right? You default back to your old favourites, those albums and songs you played on repeat when you first discovered you could make them yours.
This isn’t about guilty pleasures; it’s about those songs you’ll still be listening to when you’re old and in your rocking chair. So, enter Teenage Kicks – a playlist series that sees bands running through the music they listened to in their formative years.
Next up, Orla Gartland.
MIKA – Grace Kelly
My dad is the best dad, he always has been. When we were kids, he got to work on building the dream garden for us: a treehouse with a working phone that could call the house landline and a big swing. I feel like I caught the very end of CD culture as a kid and when ‘Now That’s What I Call Music! 66’ hit the shelves. I put that shit straight into my walkman and headed for the garden.
I was 12 and, in my own mind, alarmingly misunderstood by the entire world, so I spent many an afternoon after school listening to that CD, swinging back & forth for hours. When I heard ‘Grace Kelly’ for the first time I couldn’t believe how amazing it sounded… so colourful and stimulating, so many details, SO MANY CHORDS. I’ve never been a big musical theatre fan, but theatrical pop like this has always excited me, and I immediately adored how much that song wasn’t trying to be cool or overly earnest – it’s just pure fun. I’m in a band called FIZZ with three of my best friends and I would say that some of our record ‘The Secret To Life’ is actually pretty MIKA-adjacent.
Eminem – Mockingbird
Ok, bit of a rogue one, this. Shoutout again to my techy dad – he had a pretty amazing sound system in our house in Dublin where you could play our vinyl and CDs on speakers in most rooms and then decide which rooms in the house to pump the music out to (is my dad the unknowing inventor of SONOS?). I think maybe he had Eminem’s 2004 album ‘Encore’ on CD and would try to play it quietly in the house to himself, but I always found a way to listen in.
I know every word of this song still. In fact, most Eminem songs from this period. Luckily, I had literally no idea what the hell I was singing about – ‘Mockingbird’, for example, is about Eminem’s daughter Lainie and the hardships they experienced as a family: break-ins to their home, fame, divorce and custody, death threats and lawsuits… and there I was aged 10 and 11, scowling and spitting the bars out in my kitchen. I LOVED the flow of the rapping; trying to keep up and get all the words out of my mouth in the right order was a real challenge and way more worthy of my time and attention than any homework ever could be.
Katie Melua – The Closest Thing To Crazy
I think it was an aunt or someone from my extended family who was obsessed with this song when it came out, and so it came into my universe through osmosis. I remember hearing that little skipped beat towards the end of the chorus (when it goes, “I was never crazy… on my own”), and I couldn’t understand music enough to know what happened there, but I knew it was something unusual, it really tickled my brain. This song was also the first where I felt I could really appreciate the impact of a simple lyric tweak – they change ‘closest thing to crazy’ to ‘nearest thing to crazy’ in the chorus, and it’s like – WOAH! WOOOAHHHHHH.
Listening back now, the string parts and nylon string guitar jams go pretty hard; I can still stand behind this song; it will always have a special place in my little softie heart.
Paramore – The Only Exception
Wow, talk about a song that has aged like a fine wine. I was 14 when this song came out, skulking about the parks of North Dublin every weekend and pining after local boys that had no idea who I was. I had been playing guitar for a year or so at this point, and when I heard ‘The Only Exception’ out in the wild, all I wanted to do was sing Hayley’s part and play along to those chords. Hearing this and reading the lyrics on the home PC gave me the first version of that amazing, exposing feeling we can have as a listener – how did she crawl into my brain and write down exactly how I feel?
This song is so beautifully simple; perhaps that’s why it sounds so timeless. A love song with an acoustic guitar – WILL IT EVER GET OLD? No, no, it won’t! Inject it into my veins.
Coldplay – Viva La Vida
Man, I know we collectively give Coldplay a pretty hard time, but no one can deny that they put on a sick live show. In 2009, my dad took me and my best friend from school to the Dublin date of their tour, and I had never seen anything like it. They played to 40,000 people in Phoenix Park and pulled out every trick in the book – incredible lights, crazy pyro, they shot paper butterflies out to the crowd from giant canons… I was absolutely LIVING. I kept that paper butterfly in my journal for years.
I’m not sure I could tell you what ‘Viva La Vida’ is about lyrically – all I know was that it felt like a moment, both at that show and in the general zeitgeist of that time. When I sang it, I felt like I was marching in some fictional battle, crying out triumphantly for some unspecified victory. I felt powerful! Shoutout, too, to my other favourite Coldplay records, ‘Parachutes’ and ‘Ghost Stories’.
Joni Mitchell – The Last Time I Saw Richard
There will simply never be another like Joni. I can’t be sure what age I was when her music came onto my radar, but I will never forget the first time I heard ‘A Case Of You’, which is most people’s gateway into her landmark record, ‘Blue’. I could not believe a song so simple in its presentation could be so playful and unpredictable; the way she used her voice was absolutely mesmerising to me.
Joni, for me, is the greatest storyteller. All of us songwriters are forever obsessed with specificity, cramming the names of streets and restaurants and friends into our songs to ground them in reality – but I think Joni does this like no other. The opening lines of this one always get me:
The last time I saw Richard was in Detroit in 68
And he told me, “All romantics meet the same fate
Some day, cynical and drunk and boring
Someone in some dark cafe”
The Fray – How To Save A Life
It’s pretty remarkable to look back on the impact a single CD had on my musical upbringing – here’s another track from ‘Now That’s What I Call Music! 66’ – a hard copy of what felt like the first playlist curated specifically for me. The Mika track I mentioned was Track 1 on CD 1 and this song by The Fray was Track 1 on the second disc; a more solemn start than ‘Grace Kelly’ for sure.
Listening to this song back then, it really made me wish I’d started learning piano instead of my first instrument, violin (as if I was past my ability to learn anything by age 12 – come on). Alongside the likes of Keane and ‘Bad Day’ by Daniel Powter, this track felt like a pivotal moment for the anthemic piano pop of that time. ‘How To Save A Life’ also soundtracked a very powerful scene in Scrubs, one of my all-time favourite shows as a teenager. Looking back at that moment, I now understand the power of a perfect sync: two stories, one visual and one audio, put together to have even more impact than they could individually. That Scrubs scene extended the life of this song in my mind for years!
Sugababes – Push The Button
I feel guilty and severely unpatriotic having zero Irish artists in my eight mentioned tracks, but I cannot tell you how little Irish music was on our radio stations at home when I was younger – I remember almost exclusively Americans and British artists on the car radio. Oddly, however, it wasn’t the airwaves that delivered this one to me, and Sugababes came into my life the way all songs should – as a mobile ringtone.
Age 12, my parents gave me my first phone, a humble and lovable Nokia brick. It took me no time at all to break and destroy that almost unbreakable phone so next I branched out to something much more exciting; a hot pink Motorola Razr. This is incredibly niche – but from memory, we used to send each other ringtones at school via Infrared. (Wow – well, now I feel old.) You had to hold the two phones right up to each other for the Infrared to work, and trading these weird little clips of audio felt like my version of collecting Pokémon or something. ‘Push The Button’ came to me at school in this way, and I was completely obsessed – it was like a hi-fi ringtone as opposed to a polyphonic one, and I would press my phone speaker right up to my ear to listen to it over and over. The pre-chorus of this song is one of my favourite ever pre-choruses.
Taken from the June 2024 issue of Dork. Orla Gartland’s new single ‘Little Chaos’ is out 15th May.
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