Love Letter To A Record: Riley Pearce On Bombay Bicycle Club’s ‘Everything Else Has Gone Wrong’

Many of us can link a certain album to pivotal moments in our lives. Whether it’s the first record you bought with your own money, the chord you first learnt to play on guitar, the song that soundtracked your first kiss, the album that got you those awkward and painful pubescent years or the one that set off light bulbs in your brain and inspired you to take a big leap of faith into the unknown – music is often the catalyst for change in our lives and can even help shape who we become.

In this Love Letter To A Record series, Music Feeds asks artists to reflect on their relationship with music and share with us stories about the effect music has had on their lives.

Riley Pearce – Bombay Bicycle Club, Everything Else Has Gone Wrong, (2020)

In November 2019 my partner and I moved from Perth to Melbourne to grow our respective careers and after looking for work, finding a place of our own to live (after an extended stay at Grandma’s) we maybe got a month or two at most of enjoying our new city before the world took a strange turn.

Melbourne had quite a harsh Covid lockdown that lasted 6 months and saw our move to this new city fall flat, only for us to become very well acquainted with the inside of our tiny apartment. For exercise and somewhat of an escape I took up running, I’ve never really been a runner but a bandmate of mine who lived down the road was always off on trails and the like so I gave it a shot. I formed two paths around my local area, one that involved quite a lot of hills and one that was basically flat. I loved that feeling of early morning runs in the cold, wind tears, trying to beat my time, finishing with a warm shower and a coffee at the end and then returning to my day. I didn’t really have a running playlist, instead, I ran to this album and I loved it every time. This album really resonated with what I was going through at the time, the monotony of life in lockdown and trying to focus on the positives amongst it all. It was a lovely escape out of our small little apartment that provided me with something to look forward to.

Go To Tracks:

I Can Hardly Speak

Everything Else Has Gone Wrong

Is It Real

Do You Feel Loved?

Get Up (Opening track – perfect for raising motivation levels)

Listen to Riley Pearce’s latest ‘8 Hour Drive’ here.

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