Today I scratched an itch I have had for many years.
I discovered this artist on sound cloud, Hot Sugar, some time ago. Their music spoke to me. In particular I recall around 2017-2018 listening to this simple song about a telephone call. I didnt remember the lyrics, but I had an impression about how a simple phone call is a very beautiful way to connect with people which my generation sadly avoids. its all about text messaging these days.
I recall a colleague at the time, telling me he was working on an app idea for reminding you who you ought to reconnect with , maybe someone you haven’t spoken with in a while.
And so his idea and this anonymous song by Hot Sugar clicked for me.
But I bought their Seductive Nightmares album on itunes, which is really great, yet that song just wasn’t there.
I kind of held this hole in my mind and at the same time I also wondered why an app doesnt exist which makes it easier to call your friends called “A Phone call” say. Silly though, why dont you just use the Phone app? I dont know there is a friction where you just never get around to it and procrastination and its easier to think about writing code to solve the problem 😆.
Well the itch I scratched is not writing the app but finding the song! After 8 years, I did the research, in this case actually just prompting Claude about the one lyric fragment “a phone call” did the trick and I learned the title of the track is “Labi Siffre - Bless the Telephone (Hot Sugar edit)” , which apparently is an edit of originally Labi Siffre’s song “Bless the Telephone.” And the song I recall is apparentlyon Seductive Nightmares 3. So even today itunes only has what I bought a long time ago, which is the " Best of “.
And I looked on band camp also yet I cant find them. But doing an online search reveals they do indeed have a subdomain. [1]
I was able to find the track! Also gave a listen to Labi Siffre original [3]. Wow haha so different. Hot Sugar , Nick Koenig, did quite the transformatioj from Labi’s maybe tenor or barritone to a bass voice perhaps.
Lyrics are very beautiful either way.
Maybe now Ill have more inspiration to stop procrastinating!