Who Is Bryn Salter Playing For If Nobody Has Heard It Yet?
The singer of Sodium Aunts drops every song after 21 days. Backstage in Newcastle on a wet Thursday, he is asked who that leaves in the room.
The pause lasts 41 seconds. I know because my phone is still recording and the screen says so.
We are in a dressing room above a tyre depot in Newcastle. Rain is going sideways across the skylight. Bryn Salter is eating cold chips out of a paper tray. I have just asked him who the songs are for.
Some background, because he will not give it to you. Salter sings in Sodium Aunts. His rule is that nothing older than three weeks gets played. A laminated sheet of dates is taped inside the guitar case, and when a song hits day 22 he crosses it out in marker. Tonight's set was eleven songs. The oldest was written on October 9. It has two days left.
About 140 people came out in the rain. Nobody sang along, because there was nothing to sing. A man near the front lifted his phone to film the third song, looked at it, and put it back in his pocket. I understood him. What would he do with it?
So I asked. Songs are for somebody. Even a bad one is for the person who hums it on the bus. If nobody is allowed to learn yours, who is it for?
Then the 41 seconds. He ate three chips. The drummer found something to do with a towel.
His answer was the room. The room tonight, the people who are here, nobody early and nobody late. He said a song is like bread, and bread is not meant to be kept.
Bread gets eaten, I said. Someone takes it home. He said he didn't want to be taken home.
I'll give him this. The set had a nerve most bands lose by their second album. The drummer watched him for every change, because even the band is hearing some of it for the fourth time. Nothing was coasting. Nothing could.
But a chorus is a promise that you will come back. His choruses are written knowing they won't. Tonight they landed on 140 people who politely waited for them to be over. Freshness is a fine thing to want from a song. It is a strange thing to want from an audience.
He offered me a chip. I took it. It was cold.
Out front, the merch table sells Sodium Aunts' only record, a seven-inch from August. It is now 63 days old. He won't play it. He did sign it, though, for the one person who bought a copy before we left.
