“I’m sitting in my lounge in Thornbury, Melbourne. It’s an easy-going lounge in a 1970s apartment block. The road outside is busy with every type of Melbourne vehicle except for trams or trains. It’s an important road, one of the ones that run East to West as far as the eye can see.

Melbourne is in its sixth city wide lockdown. The people of Melbourne are well and truly done with lockdown culture, this is the categorical fact of the present. People want change, people don’t want the immediate status quo. There’s something in that.

I haven’t been here for all six lockdowns as I spent most of last year in Aotearoa, from March through to December. It was cool to be back home; cool to see the Audio Foundation doing so much; cool to see our friends’ bands play; cool to make a new friend or two; cool to touch base with the tangata whenua.

I’ve lost count of how many lockdowns and how many houses I’ve lived through since March 2020. And, if I keep going the way I’m going I will have had more jobs in the past 6 months than the past 20 years. There’s been some flux, yes. The constants over the past 18 months have been writing, playing and listening to music. More or less I do all these things with my partner Renee Barrance. The playlist below is an abbreviated list of our favourites from the last 18 months.”
– Tim Player (September 9, 2021)