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.
Mikaila Delgado, Yours Truly – You Me At Six, Sinners Never Sleep (2011)
It was 2011 when I met you. It was during my nightly routine of watching countless music videos on YouTube after school and homework. I came across the video for ‘Bite My Tongue’ and felt my brain explode. Where had this band been? Why am I only hearing of them now? I liked to think my taste in music was very cool for a thirteen year old, whose wall was plastered with posters of their favourite bands. Now I was missing my favourite.
The next day I bought myself an iTunes gift card so I could purchase the album and listen to it in full, and that’s all I did… for ages. You soundtracked the next few years of my life, and to this day there are not many albums that give me the same first-listen feeling. I was wrapped up in the world of your twelve songs, with the versatility of each track. I still think the reason I am so obsessed with the concept of versatility in my own music is because of how much I enjoyed the journey of this album. To open with the hard-hitting ‘Loverboy’ that owns a bassline that is impossible to beat, to the sweetness of ‘Crash’ that gives me such a warm feeling inside. I cannot forget ‘No One Does It Better’ and the desperation in the vocals that I’ve sang my heart out to countless times.
This album will always hold a place in my heart because it taught me how to appreciate a whole album. From start to finish. It pushed me to want to achieve something like this, to write something I could love myself as much as I loved this. To portray pure honesty in what I write, to tell stories like you do.
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Yours Truly’s debut album ‘Self Care’ is out now.
