Words and ripples - the story of A Longing Look
I was recently asked to submit "a thing you made" as part of a tender. So I did what I'd been meaning to do for years - write the story of A Longing Look, an occasional online blog about song lyrics.
“As if it only happened yesterday…”
Phil couldn’t believe it and nor could I.
The words were right there under the Spectator masthead. Words that Phil had written, that he’d published on Medium just like all the thousands of other words we’d written for A Longing Look. Only now, by the magic of digital syndication, one of our little posts had been fished from its niche corner of the internet and was being proudly held up for clicks by a proper publication.
Our little side-project had been deemed legitimate online content.
The piece that did it was about Levi Stubbs’ Tears by Billy Bragg. Phil had heard Bragg speak at a literary festival, and when he saw Lionel Shriver there a few days later, something clicked and an idea emerged. By then, working on A Longing Look had taught us to pay attention to these moments. These little epiphanies, these quiet ghosts. Let me in at your window, they sing. So Phil did, opening his mind all over again to a much-loved song of his youth, seeing what it had to say to him today about love and pain and the redemptive power of music.
Sometimes a piece of narrative art says more about the brutality of the world than real life. Sometimes the best art form for that narrative is a three-minute pop song. That was how Phil felt about Levi Stubb’s Tears and he explained the feeling beautifully in the piece. It turned out the guy from the Spectator felt the same. It turned out the guy from the Spectator was a massive Billy Bragg fan. This made sense. As fans, we treasure a song when it captures how we feel about the world. We treasure writing when we see ourselves reflected in it. When we find a piece of writing that captures how we feel about a song we treasure, it triggers a multiplier effect. Love, squared. Phil’s love letter ended up on the Spectator blog because it captured for that one reader - who also happened to be the editor - so much he already felt about the song.
We were shocked but not surprised. After all, our whole thing was that lyrics are worthy of close attention. What felt more unlikely was that he stumbled across the piece in the first place. It’s not like there’s a shortage of things to read on the internet. No one has to read anything we write. But people do, and the numbers in which they do it can often blow my mind. A Longing Look is hosted on Medium. Medium cares about reading time and gives you a rolling count of ‘minutes read’ over the last 90 days. If I look at the site stats now, that figure reads 8,159 minutes. That’s 136 hours of reading time over three months. If we assume that number stays consistent (we haven’t published anything new for a year - topicality isn’t exactly our strong point), it makes for about 22 weeks’ worth of reading time over 7 years.
In aggregate, it adds up to the best part of 5 months. Never mind being in the Spectator, that's something I can't quite believe.
Not that I think about it too much, though. This story was never about scale. It’s not about syndication or exposure or validation from an industry we’re not really part of. The meaning of this story is way smaller. Or to be accurate, more intimate. This is, after all, a project about love letters. In the real world, love letters brim with passion, but they remain furtive. They’re private. Their effect can be slow and cumulative, or they can transform your world in an instant. But either way, they are quiet. Personal. Controlled explosions of the heart. They’re like a stone dropped in water: the splash can be small but the ripples still extend in all directions.
The real story of A Longing Look is what happened because of those ripples. Its meaning isn’t found in any accolades or fame that came the way of its protagonists (long story short: none did). Instead, the meaning lies in the way the two of us conduct our work now. In the value we attach to care, craft, and connection. It’s a story about a side-project that gently, slowly, disturbed the surface tension of two careers and set them pointing in new directions. That shows the value of close readings and escaping your comfort zone. It’s about the power and paradox of intimacy, how even the smallest stories can make anyone’s world a little bigger.
“Just believe and you can’t go wrong…”
But before I explain all that, let’s rewind.
The story starts a couple of years before the Spectator moment, with two planner blokes in the pub. I’d just left London and was a few months into a new life in Bristol. Phil had made that change years ago, making an obvious success of things in Edinburgh. His move was a motivating example for me as I sought to make a career outside London that was might still be inside the world of advertising. This was 2014 or so. Pre-Covid. Pre-the exodus. Pre-the idea that a work life might be possible beyond the walls of a few particular buildings in central London. Back then, the gravitational pull of the capital was still strong, certainly for jobs and events. But there was a great community online, with brilliant planning blogs to read and comment on. Twitter was a supportive, educational space. To be a planner then was to be a citizen of a virtual world whose currency was writing. It was writing that connected people. Phil and I both had blogs and writing mine taught me the value of writing as a way to think more clearly. We would meet at Google Firestarters, and in the pub afterwards. Almost inevitably, two planners who got on and wanted to write might, eventually, want to write about something other than planning. Perhaps just as inevitably, that thing was music.
We threw ideas back and forth. We were two guys who’d never actually worked together, learning to collaborate over email while living 400 miles apart. At first, we were the strategy version of Cobbler’s Children, doing everything we’d learned not to do working for clients. We were indecisive. We leapt to multiple impossible futures. We were completely unrealistic about resources and how much time we’d really have to dedicate to his project. And by ‘we’ what I mean of course is ‘I’. I was hopeless. I was claiming I’d be able to do two posts a week to really get this thing zinging. I was convinced we’d become the next online publishing sensation when this thing didn’t even have a name or a concept. Phil, on the other hand, was calm, composed and in touch with designers he thought might be useful when we had something.
At one point we couldn’t even choose between hosting the writing on social or using a blogging platform. Thankfully we found a happy medium. Or rather: we found Medium, and were happy. The publishing platform was new-ish at the time, and we’d both been using it for work posts. It was a joy to write in. Tactile, intuitive. Then we realised it had a publication mode. It was easy to aggregate everything you wrote under one heading without having to build a website or decide on a blogging platform. It allowed for multiple writers should we want them (or should they want us), and even had an editor feature. We would be editors. This was exciting, and scary. I had visions of marching around barking deadlines or striking through people’s copy in red pen or demanding writers stop burying the damn lede. In practice, calling ourselves by that name always felt a bit of a stretch. Of the 90 or so articles we’ve published, only nine or ten came from other writers, and we weren’t hugely involved in their development. We certainly didn’t commission them. We were pitched and we said yes because the writing was too good not to. But I like to think some combination of our early creative choices, our own writing and perhaps even the ideas was what attracted those writers. In a way their pieces are the ones of which I’m most proud. There’s nothing like other people wanting to join your thing to really make you feel you’ve made a thing.
“A sudden sense of liberty…”
So, this thing. What was it, exactly?
We described it as ‘an online music publication’, which was a rubbish description and - spoiler alert - we never managed to improve on it. But we did give it a name. A Longing Look. The phrase came from the chorus of an Elvis Costello song. (This is why there are spectacles in the logo - Phil had been right about the designer.)
And we did, when it came to it, have an idea. Even a proposition: Love letters to lyrics. Boom. Writing about writing. Using words to riff on other people’s words. Now, if you’ve met any planners, you’ll know this is a thing they quite like to do. Yet despite this, other people, normal people, seemed to like it too, perhaps because lyrics felt like a fresh angle. Nowadays, everyone from Scott Walker to Kate Bush to Neil Tennant (all of whom we’ve written about) has put out books of their lyrics. But back then it felt interesting to put lyrics in the spotlight. To work out what they did, or how they did it, or simply to observe their effect on our past selves. The idea was for our interest to trasmit to the reader. Sometimes lyrics hold great meaning for the listener. Sometimes we don’t think about them at all. But whether the lyric is famous and forgotten, or little known and worthy of celebration, people do like to linger over a song. So much so they might even let a couple of planners wang on about words as part of the deal.
The core brief to ourselves, then, was this: persuade the reader a lyric is brilliant. To help, we came up with two rules, which we also shared with guest writers. A brief, if you will. Looking back, I think it’s just the right side of self-important:
These are love letters so the writing has to feel like it really matters. The style is as important as the content. We want each post to obviously be a labour of love. And we want the writing to be good.
It's primarily about the lyrics. What they mean. And, just as importantly, what they mean to you. It is hard, if not impossible sometimes, to separate lyrics from performance but we try.
We launched with four pieces. We were a little bloke-centric and white at the start (the Beatles, Meat Loaf and Bruce Springsteen were all featured), but we got better at trying not to be. We aimed for a couple of posts a month, but didn't beat ourselves up if we fell off the pace. Frequency of publication depended on our work commitments, and on how disciplined or inspired we were. Basically it was a hobby we did when we wanted.
But as it grew, the publication warranted more structure. The writing was varied and no genre was off-limits, so we needed a design language to make it feel consistent. The title of the essay was always a quote from the lyric, the sub-heading always “A love letter to the lyrics of…”. We made sure a big, bold photograph sat across the top of the article and was the lead image when we posted on social media. We policed formatting so that lyrics - the star of the show - were always quoted in the same way. When there was a critical mass of love letters, we started linking to previous posts at the end of each article, encouraging people to linger even longer, and explore the publication thematically. Over time we formalised those connections as distinct pages that grouped the posts into categories that reflected our recurring interests. Songs of our youth. Twisted love songs. The visionary power of words.
Other writers asked to take part immediately. Weirdly, but also gratifyingly, journalists and poets put themselves forward first. Some were in our network, some weren’t. They’d do one or two ‘guest’ posts then move on, which was fine by us. God it was enough anyone knew it existed. As we published more, the ‘pinch yourself’ moments started coming. Phil’s Spectator was a big deal, of course. But there was also the attention we got from the artists we wrote about. A member of Madness shared Phil’s piece on My Girl. Mike Scott of The Waterboys, writer of the glorious Fisherman’s Blues, called my love letter to that song “beautiful”. What a thrill. He even took the time to correct, sweetly and generously, my misheard lyrics.
With confidence came the courage to experiment. Phil re-cast the lyrics of Queen’s We Are The Champions as soliloquies from Shakespearean characters. I imagined Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus as a creative brief written by America’s evangelical religious right. I consciously put more storytelling elements into individual articles, making lyrics a jumping-off point for character sketches of my favourite artists, like John Lydon and Brian Wilson. After writing my way into novelistic songs like Roxy Music’s In Every Dream Home A Heartache, I even attempted short stories of my own; love letters as short stories. The most successful of these was the silently screaming bride, her lovelessness hidden in plain sight just like it is in the lyrics of Hey Ya!. But there was also the stuck parent and child, an invisible wall between them, made of John Maryn’s Solid Air.
None of this was going to make us famous. In the end, it’s enough that A Longing Look amounts to good writing that we’re both proud of. But last year, I saw one of our most loyal readers and occasional contributor, Tim, recommend A Longing Look to someone on Twitter. He said “James and Phil are responsible for totally changing the way I think about music writing - and how good it can be.”
A connection like that with just one person is more than enough for me.
“I find a higher state of grace in my mind…”
Pre-pandemic I met up with and had a drink with Amy, a poet and playwright and all-round brilliant writer and communicator who’d contributed blazing pieces about Beyonce and Martha Wainwright for us. “So you’ve made this amazing thing”, she said to me, “what are you going to do with it?” I had no answer. I wondered if we should be doing more. Like turning it into a book. Or, like we’d talked about right at the start, pitching it as a feature to an existing platform.
But in the end the success of A Longing Look was less about what we did with it, and more about what it did with us. The magic was in the ripples, not the splash.
Publishing regularly made us more confident. That’s good when it comes to ignoring the trolls, or the occasional angry comment, or the most common response on the internet: indifference. (There was also wonderful feedback, and many posts found their way into the online communities and fandoms of the relevant artists.) Sharing creative work with the world is a way to build resilience. The ‘publish’ button forces you to say, it’s finished. To say, this is now the thing it was waiting to become. This is the inner gauge writers need. It’s not the same thing as meeting deadlines, or getting work signed off, or realising client objectives. It is an artist’s ability to know when their work is good enough.
This, for me at least, is the legacy of A Longing Look.
Phil and I used each other to cultivate our own inner gauge. We shared drafts of every post. Knowing someone would read our work closely helped make it better and made repeating oneself harder. Over time the goal shifted, at least for me. I started out wanting to get closer to the lyrics; today I’d rather get closer to what I’m trying to say. As a result, my writing at work became more effective. Not that I became indulgent - quite the opposite; I learned that good writing benefits the person communicating only insofar as it respects and benefits the reader. To be memorable, you need to think about what people actually want to hear. So, I became an evangelist in my work for more thoughtful communication. For respecting the attention clients and prospects afforded us. It’s amazing how far a little of that goes.
Another ripple. A Longing Look kickstarted my interest in writing fiction. I studied the structure of stories and the underlying principles of how they worked. Eventually my worlds collided. I proposed to an agency who knew me well a presentation-writing course, which was built on the principles of effective storytelling. I trained more than 70 people with it. As lockdown hit I took it online with the APG and in turn it became a module in a course I’ve been running with the APG for two years.
Those ripples travelled a long way. When A Longing Look started, Phil and I were both employed by agencies. Eight years on, neither of us are. You might well counter, ah James, it’s not like you make a living writing love letters to lyrics, is it? (There was, sadly, no further syndication by the Spectator and no paying offers from them or anyone else.) But now, we’re both independent. We’ve both found a way to put a facility for words at the heart of our work. Phil runs a consultancy for B2B brands, I help people think more critically and imaginatively about the strategy story they’re trying to tell. My work with agencies and clients is split between training, facilitating, and doing, and increasingly it’s narrative that people want help with, more so than insight or direction or outcomes.
The reason, of course, is the same reason the Spectator syndicated Phil’s post. It’s the same reason anybody reads or shares our love letters, and the real reason any story takes hold. A story is a form of connection between its writer and its audience, one that’s strongest when the writer lets the audience see themselves in it. Because here’s the thing about stories: the audience does a lot of the work. A little thought in this area goes a long way because an audience wants to lean in. My very first love letter for A Longing Look was about the poet, rapper and writer, Kae Tempest. In their book, On Connection, they make the point that “readers are crucial to the text or story becoming powerful. We are a fundamental part of the circuitry. If we are not connected, the charge will not be able to flow.” I’ve learned that the task of the writer is that connection.
Our dream with A Longing Look was that people would linger. Browse. Take their time. Getting a read on that was why I loved Medium’s reading stats. But now I realise that engaging an audience means planning for the opposite. People don’t take their time, they give it. This is true with blogs and magazines and TV shows and it’s true with pitch presentations. And, of course, with love letters. That’s why the mantra when writing any of the above should be the inversion of the break-up cliche.
It’s not me, says the sign over the writer’s desk, it’s you.