What hole did this come from aye? by Thazi Wisudha Edwards

Like all HBG creations there are many corners slipping out from this closet. But my first memory was Jonny whipping the outro guitar riff just as we were falling into an official hiatus and just about every impromptu jam session given an opportunity since!

*The writing thing...*

Once J&J got to dressing the form and colour, I had moved to Madrid. Whilst chomping on onion tortillas and 40cent litres of Mahou my taste buds were getting a fruity fill of the Harrow variety - these first delicious melodies and co-rhythms landing like a saucy symphony on my remote, now Iberian, palette. "So what percussion to compliment this already nutritious bowl?" I thought. I set myself on a few, long drawn out winter runs in the rain, hunting a beat and a sound that was organic, deep and warm. As our first acoustic track, I wanted to give space first, a light woody texture pairing second, and a phat wall of resound for dessert.

*What does it mean?*

To us, well, the significance came from togetherness; it was the first piece we'd co-written/shaped since our dear Jeff came above ground in Xyrs. To compliment, we pulled in Kyri again, our sound engineer and producer who painted such wonders on the Boo Death track in 2012 (the last song we wrote, finished, played pre-hiatus). To us all, this song brings themes on the idea of connection/disconnection which have been so relevant and precious this last year. To co-exist in new contexts, be it different continents, phases of life or emotional spaces of minds and worlds.

***

Does The Heartbeat Generation Even Exist? An Essay by Jeff Bahlo

A real question to consider: did The Heartbeat Generation ever stop existing?

This was something I often pondered during our five years of hiatus. It was an unarticulated hiatus for us, a darkness growing where there was once camaraderie and living in each other's pockets and suddenly we were many miles and many years apart.

Who knew if we would ever speak again? Would The Heartbeat Generation ever write a song, play a show or even just jam again? Much more importantly: what became of our friendship? And did our band ever even exist in the first place?

I think the answer to the last question can help us with the rest: did The Heartbeat Generation ever exist? The answer to that is a resounding yes. Let us reminisce.

We began the band when I was 17, when my girlfriend and I were enamoured with the idea of starting our own Arcade Fire. The memories of those first rehearsals at Thazi's old house by Harrow On The Hill Station (featuring, if memory serves: Me, Thazi, Chris, Jonny, Tomson and Jaice) will live long in the memory. A song about "picking up the phone" and very much in the style of Arcade Fire. Chords: A, E, Bm, D. One day we'll bring that song back, just watch.

Like a phoenix stubbornly thrashing around in a dumpster fire, we would keep viscerally reviving as the years passed and life took us all to different places around the country and around the world. We played some shows. We recorded some songs. We enjoyed each other's company, sharing peak experiences rehearsing and playing gigs, and commemorating our communal creativity by recording the standouts amongst our dozens upon dozens of songs. To this day, these scant recordings are now timestamps of our youth for all of us.

With a shoe-string budget, little to no know-how and the utmost pluck, we did exist. Almost a lot. But at least a little. On the periphery of any legitimate music scene in Central London. On the edges of our supportive and intersecting friendship groups. In the well wishes of our families who would come to every show we'd work so hard to rehearse for that we'd completely overlook the opportunity to promote the show!

The band meant the world to me. We started as kids and as the years passed, we would always come home to each other. To shows and to songwriting and to hanging out. Always to hanging out.

I remember first learning guitar around the age of 16 and just sitting in front of the old PC in my living room looking up the chords for every song I loved, playing my scrappy versions just to inhabit the song. To feel like I was inside the music itself, inside something both as solid and yet as ephemeral as a song. To project and sing it out, to take it all in and then rip it all out.

I had always imagined myself as someone who would grow up to be a writer but, very unexpectedly, I became obsessed with songwriting. With lyrics and rhythms and melodies and whatever noise I could conjure that would give me that feeling of: yes, that's it. Some sort of spiritual synchronicity and emotional excavation, when a melody tumbling out of my throat would float over some chords and just feel right. It is hard to describe. That feeling was not on tap but sometimes after hours of plugging away, it would come. And sometimes, it would grab me when I wasn't even ready. That continues to this day. It is an endlessly mysterious process I am humbled to work, play and participate in.

The songs I would create with Jonny, Chris and Thazi were another level though. When we played together, it would always shock me to my very core and bring me indescribable joy. The music we would create together brought an inspiration I simply could not have conjured alone. It was all about this four way dance. I could have stayed with those three in rehearsal rooms all day and every day. It was hard work sometimes, and gruelling, but it filled me profoundly.

I can still recall so often closing my eyes while improvising some poetry over the music my three friends were making and feeling like I was flying. Like I was inside the sky as it unfurled before me and I was just soaring, weightless and infinite. Like a space both beneath and inside me was burgeoning, growing, carrying me and satisfying me: pure flight.

And then I would open my eyes. And we would dismount together, nailing a safe landing. I am very glad that I would take that time to smell those roses, absolutely and completely flying through the air.

When the four of us began rehearsing at The Roundhouse in Camden in the early 2010s, our chemistry electrified and we really hit our stride refining the songs that seemed to so organically arise if we just jammed and hung out with instruments. While the others were going to university and getting their first jobs, dealing with the responsibilities of young adulthood, I was running as far as I could from all of that, dropping out of university and constantly quitting jobs. I was quickly discovering how shit I was at most things and it was dawning on me that a life in the arts, as unlikely and difficult as that would be to forge, was looking like both my most meaningful avenue of employment and quite possibly the only thing I could capably do.

But the others were getting their lives together. Finding partners, qualifications, promotions and places to live. Exploring the world and doing right by their parents. There was such a subtle push and pull in those years; I fully respected their growth and life choices, but I just wanted so badly for all of us to give being a "real band" a go. Couldn't we try to properly exist in the world, as a flashy brand that could catch the attention of people in the music industry, rather than just contentedly continue as a personal pet project?

These far flung ambitions of mine never reduced how meaningful the band was to me, I was just looking at it from a rather desperate point of view. Sometimes I thought I wanted them to love the band just a bit more than they did. In fact, I wanted to use the band to run away from adulthood and I think what we all needed was for me to use other parts of my life to get my shit together rather than our band.

After struggling with depression and mental health issues throughout my teens and early twenties, it came to a breaking point around the age of 25. This was just after we had recorded Boo Death, our crowning achievement for me. I was unemployed, kicked out of my home, trying to set up a record label, getting my first band The Reveals back together, putting on open mic nights and basically doing everything possible to stay busy by frantically filling up my schedule, distracting my mind and, eventually, guaranteeing a very drastic burn out. Let alone the subsequent five year hiatus of the band, I was about to embark upon an all-encompassing personal hiatus. A dark and prolonged night of the soul. After many years of occasionally ghosting my circle, only to come back into view a few months later at most, I was about to draw a line in the sand that for a time felt as though it was carved into cement. Not a single meaningful relationship beside some familial ties would survive it.

I moved back to Leicester to finally get my BA in Drama and English and ended up doing a Masters in Arts too. I got back into acting and learned to live alone and manage my mental health. Somehow, what precipitated this was cutting off all my lifelong best friends, including the members of The Heartbeat Generation. It didn't feel like I was holding a grudge. But in trying to let go of the people who had partially defined my past in the hope that I could finally create a new pattern of future, I was definitely holding on to something. When I think of those days, I think of clenching my fists. Grinding my jaw. Tension. Holding on tight. And even though I finally had gotten my life together, things are not black and white, and I had made a life altering mistake along the way: I missed my friends dearly.

I didn't touch a guitar for the next five long years. I couldn't listen to music. I would walk out of shops if a song that reminded me of my former life in music came on. I would change the channel. I found it vaguely traumatising. It was excruciating how quickly I didn't care about any aspirations to make a career in music and just missed being in a room with my friends and making noise.

When I moved back to London and got back in touch with the band, it was beautiful. I recall walking around South Harrow on the phone to Chris, his warm voice moved to hear mine. Meeting up with Thazi at the Wetherspoons pub in Harrow, his mouth agape at how easily we were falling back into our friendship after all that time. Jonny took me a hot second to reach out to. I was worried we were on bad terms, despite struggling to recall the exact particulars of it. I just knew it felt slightly more tricky than reaching out to the others. And then before I knew it, we were going to see The National, The Mountain Goats and Big Thief together. He was back in my living room in Surrey Road and we were writing songs quicker than we could talk, everything unsaid resolved in a swirl of chords and shouting. Nothing had changed. The relationships we have, as friends and musicians, are just there. Embedded in our childhoods and continually enriching us all as we grow older. I was so grateful, and I still am; that light does not dim. The first time I played guitar after nearly half a decade, I sent Thazi a voicenote on WhatsApp. Within weeks of that, I was writing songs again.

Jonny one day played me some guitar parts he had been messing around with for years. I was singing over the beautiful music within seconds and within hours I was playing guitar too, and we were doing what we do best: sewing a song together. From the material of the stellar guitar bits Jonny had and the new contributions I was overlaying, it all came together as naturally as ever. This was it. Our first full song back. And very quickly, we realised we treasured this one and we were not going to let another sketch gather dust on the shelf. This one deserved recording. Over the course of a few rehearsals with just the two of us, the song took shape. Not only was the band back but it was all coming into clear view now: we had never gone away. Our experiences, as kids who were friends, and as young adults in a band, bonded us forever. It was simply up to us whether we tuned in to our collective power and decided to write songs again. Well. Here we were. Happenstance or destiny, here we are.

Jonny got a little home-made studio set up at his old house on Devonshire Road and we would have weekly sessions where I would come round and we would record my guitar parts and vocals to put on top of his gorgeous, intricate main track. We were finally experimenting with backing vocals too, after years of me hassling everyone to sing with me! We had a lot of fun. Finally putting these raw ingredients in a pot and getting to cooking them properly.

Later that year around Christmas, when so many in our friendship group annually make that pilgrimage back to Harrow to visit family, Chris and Thazi came to my house on Surrey Road to record the bass and drums. Chris and Jonny had to drive around to get all the equipment but once we got everything in my front room where we had been jamming since we were teenagers, we were finally adding the last ingredients to our first song in years, as a bunch of dudes in their thirties.

It was all heartbreakingly wholesome. I couldn't believe we were here again. I couldn't believe how much the music we were making together, again and still, was something I couldn't have ever conceived of on my own. I was part of it and it was part of me and yet it was bigger than me. In that way, a band is such a good metaphor for family and community: to be valued and a part of a larger whole as an integral and independent part of it. It requires so much empathy and communication, so much individual assertion and cooperation with conviction.

And that is the heart of this song: "don't exist alone, it's not up to you." Whether you remove yourself artificially like I did for many years or not, any efforts to isolate yourself out of your community or your own existence is in vain. You are a sacred part of existence in tandem with the rest of us, just as I am. And just as I was even during all those lost years I didn't speak to the boys, what is borne out by how warmly I was welcomed back with open arms is: the love remained. It wasn't up to me.

At least in part (besides the other flavours of falling in love, falling out of love, falling hard in that way, noticing how beautiful the hometown you grew up hating can be and how that can heal you, finding the divine in the everyday etc) what I sing in this song emanated from a very joyous wonder at the fact that a song by the four of us could exist in this life. I had spent so long pretty down about the fact that I was sure it would never happen again. This was all quite a plot twist. And I was singing in awe of that plot twist, as if there was no tomorrow I could rely on in which I could take it for granted.

What happened next? The pandemic of 2020. Thazi moved across the continent. Jonny moved across the country. I moved across town. And Chris ... well, Chris would occasionally text back, which was much bigger news than any of us moving!

But what did that mean for our new song? Well, we had everything ready to go but we needed someone with exceptional talent to help us put our ship out into the water. So we recruited one of our band's best friends in the world: Kyri Demetriou, the producer extraordinaire of A-Tonal Recording Studio, the man who had recorded us at his studio in Stanmore (for a ridiculously reasonable price for a few days) and then sprinkled magic fairy dust on the track that resulted from these sessions, our favourite: Boo Death.

With Kyri thankfully back in the fold, we have spent much of 2020 on regular video calls: discussing edits, changes, preferences and just catching up and dicking about. Possibly because it was the only avenue of creativity available for the time being, we became perfectionists to a degree we had never indulged in before. Every minor change we could think of, Kyri would fulfill. And once we decided that wasn't the right change, could we change it back, Kyri would put that right again too. Like a master craftsman perfecting every aspect of a ship in a bottle, he managed the impossible: to equally please all four of us! It has genuinely been a year of that, and people around us have been right to sometimes mistakenly think we were putting a whole new album together with the amount of time and effort we were putting in! Nope. Just one little seven minute song. But she's sort of our miracle baby so ... she's rather special to us, you see.

Nayyar Jamie capped off the song making process by producing the wonderful art work you see here, originating in the "apple seeds fall from a heaven of trees" lyric. She developed her own tree of life, brimming and bristling with colour and fertility, both gentle and powerful. It is a symbol of purity. Existence unencumbered.

Exist is finally ready now. It is hard to let go of the process of getting it ready, to be honest with you. But our kid is ready to go to school, all dressed up and stood at the door posing for her picture. We can't keep her here forever. She has to go make her way in the world.

We will not stop now, despite our current moment in history doing it's best to ground us all to a halt. We have so many new songs, some written days ago and some written over a decade ago, ready to record. And, crucially, so many more beyond that that haven't come yet. They are hanging up there in the ether, like ripe fruit just waiting for the right opportunity. For us to come together and hang out. New songs are right there for the taking. More than you know and more than we know too.

And hey, maybe we'll never make a living out of our music. But we will definitely all make a life out of making music. And I know which one of those I'd choose if I could only choose one.

Now come hang out.

With love to my brothers who value me and let me be in this band, this goes out to my Nonna, who died in 2020. I love you. Thank you for encouraging me to make music, to be courageous, to be strong, to be myself, to love myself, to be happy and to sing. x