If you were a teenager in the early days of the internet, few moments were as crucial to your emerging digital identity as the moment when you got to choose your email address.
Oh sure, you may have already been given an email address by your school, or assigned one by your parents when they first brought the internet into your household. But those email addresses likely came with a boring, predetermined username of the first-initial-last-name variety.
I’m talking about the email address that you went and created for yourself. This one would have a cool username. Something that signalled your uniqueness, or your cleverness, or your allegiance to a particular band or sports team. Something to prove that you were special, an individual unlike anyone else.
Years later, as you matured and realized you had a professional identity to maintain, you probably swept that old email account under the rug, embarrassed by what potential employers or potentially significant others might think. Or maybe you kept it active in a new role: the account you use when signing up for something that you know is going to lead to a pile of spam.
Before you ask: yes, I have one, and no, I will not be sharing it here.
However, I can share that when British electronic artist Thomas Gandey decided in 2004 to start his own musical project after years of playing for others, he took his stage name from his first Hotmail account: Cagedbaby.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The jazz loop it’s built around – piano, upright bass, barely-there drums, and the tail end of a vocal line – sounds like a sample pulled from a crate deep in the basement of a record store. But the internet seems to have no answers for where the sample originates, or if it’s a sample at all. My best guess is that it was created for the song, likely by jazz musician Mike Del Ferro, who’s credited as co-writer on the track, and whose style lines up with the vibe of this song.
2. After a minute and a half of lulling the listener to sleep, the sample suddenly jumps up a tone; a sonic nudge in the ribs to remind you to keep listening.
3. For a song usually tagged as “electronic” there isn’t much electronic here – except for a nice little wubb-wubb-wubb bass at 2:20.
Recommended listening activity:
Re-reading the oldest email messages in your oldest inbox.