happy anniversary 💛

sixteen tubes of toothpaste of us x

Haló a chroí,

A note here to say happy anniversary!!

I love when some arbitrary idea or useless information hangs around in the back of your mind awaiting it’s chance to chime in: you realise you know all the lyrics to a song you haven’t heard in a decade, or the haunted post-Catholic compulsion to join in prayer the odd time you’re obliged to frequent a church now.

2008 was the height of my Bon Iver obsession. I discovered terms like “indie folk” and “falsetto”. My 16GB gigabyte mp3 player was my pride and joy. I cried after school when a boy threw it across a desk saying it looked “like it came free in a Kellogg’s box” (it did). Around that time, I read an interview with Justin Vernon in which he mentioned that he would “measure time in tubes of toothpaste”. For almost twenty years now this idea has reverberated and resurfaced often, as vivid as the first time I read those words:

“Everybody’s shedding skin every three or four months, I remember when I was a kid I would measure time by tubes of toothpaste, because I always felt like every time I got a new tube I’d shed a bunch of skin and grown up a lot more. So it’s like that three-month thing, I wanna try and do it all in one toothpaste tube.”

In 2008, I shared tubes of toothpaste with two siblings. I have since shared with housemates, lovers, friends, overnight friends of housemates, partners, my siblings again when I moved home for a while… and so the lifespan of a tube varies wildly. At the moment I seem to average about 2 months per tube. And the theory holds: I finish a tube and reflect on what has passed, changed, grown, or been shed since it was first opened. Tubes spent writing a thesis; tubes dating someone new; tubes spent living by the sea with six people and a dog; tubes since a breakup; tubes since moving into a new home; the amount of toothpaste it takes to get over a rough patch; minty fresh weeks spent in awe of the world.

All to say that this newsletter has existed for ... I’m going to estimate about sixteen tubes of toothpaste (four years this month!). Lots of opportunities have come of it but I love it always comes back down to sending a rambling e-mail to my friends and a handful of other people who like weird pop-culture references and good music.

And it’s been a while since I compiled one of these old-school entries, so we’re going back to our roots and the newsletter as it was in the beginning: a roundup of music, articles, films, and ideas that have made me think of you in the past tube or so of toothpaste x

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Listening to…

Obviously the changing streaming landscape has altered how this newsletter works. We used to all use Spotify, and now I have no idea what people are listening to, or where to place my own streaming loyalty. I still have Spotify but have been trialing Apple and Tidal. I hear Qobuz is best but haven’t tried it yet.

I have really been enjoying NTS, especially as something to throw on in the background while I’m working, though granted these are some darker / spookier sets:

• Lankum: Samhain Special 30th October 2025 | Listen on NTS

• Millennium Madness w/ Shampain 13th November 2025 | Listen on NTS

I also really enjoyed Olan Monk’s playlist for TANK over on Soundcloud featuring everything from Sinéad O’Connor to Caitlín Maude. Their BBC6 session is worth a listen too.

Olan was one of my top picks of 2025 for The Irish Times alongside RÓIS, MayKay, Cameron Winter (Love Takes Miles!!), KhakiKid and Olivia Dean:

For something uplifting and wholesome: I could listen all day to Eoin Warner on the magic of our native flora and fauna and really enjoyed his conversation on RTÉ Radio 1 about the changing landscapes of The Burren. He’s made a docu-series for TG4 that is absolutely stunning and soothing, would make for lovely idir-dhá-Nollaig evening viewing: Oileán Glas, Fásach Bán | Player | Irish Television Channel, Súil Eile

State of the Union might be one of the best things I watched in 2025. A bite-size series of ten ten-minute episodes in which a couple go for a drink before marriage counselling every week. Written by Nick Hornby (About A Boy, High Fidelity), the first series stars Chris O’Dowd and Rosamund Pink and I have just learned that there is a second series featuring Brendan Gleeson(!!). Short, sweet, human and hilarious. Highly bingeable.

A recent dive into personal history has brought me down some mad rabbit holes. Over the next while I’d love to visit the haunts of my grandparents’ generation and other members of the Italian community in London - E. Pellicci, The French Club, the church in Dalston - but at the moment I live in the old Italian quarter in the Liberties, where places like Fusco’s are still run by families who came to Ireland in the 1950’s and 60’s. I think there must be so many stories to collect, and have been gathering what I can from my own grandfather, but I loved this little documentary by Nino Tropiano, worth a watch if you’d like something a little bit niche and very nostalgic: Chippers: The story of the Italian community in Ireland.

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I think 2026 will see a lot of us unplugging our brains from the algorithm. It’s been fun seeing content creators try make to their time spent offline seem chic and alluring whilst creating content for the platforms they are trying to keep us engaged with. Society is full of irony if nothing else.

This year at Raidió Rí-Rá we ran an mentorship scheme for Irish language musicians and it was so interesting (and frustrating) to think about social media through the lens of an artist. Thankfully people seem to be rallying against the numbers game though, and The Future of Music Marketing Is No Marketing at All, apparently. In It’s Cool to Have No Followers Now for the New Yorker, Kyle Chayka wrote:

Jack Antonoff, who hit his creative peak in the twenty-tens, has more than a half million followers on X, whereas the acclaimed up-and-coming musician Nourished by Time has just over three thousand. Which is a better follow? The large numbers don’t quite mean what they used to as signals of relevance or clout, as social media has become more aged, more manipulable, and more automated by artificial intelligence…

…In a time when people are posting everything about their lives online constantly for attention, you almost get a little frustrated that someone can be successful without doing that.

Maybe 2026 is the year to go analogue. I love that Rosalía made a point of her newest album LUX being a “human” album (although note how she doesn’t rule out future AI assistance): “AI is non-existent on this album. At one point I had the thought: let’s take advantage of the fact that AI exists, let’s ask it to write a verse, and see how it goes. The result was terribly disappointing. AI is very interesting, but for now, this album is made by humans.”

It’s such a buzzy topic. It comes up over pints and everyone in the pub has an opinion. Overall, I love that there seems to be a reversion to the authentic. A conscious bolstering against the replacement of human creativity. I spoke to David Keenan a while ago and we hypothesised that independent musicians and artists needn’t truly worry about AI in terms of audience. There have always been listeners who are happy to listen to the Top 10 on rotation, and some of them won’t mind when those tracks are created or optimised by AI, but they aren’t the audience who seek out alternative songwriters or innovative creators. They never were.

In a way it’s the same argument we’ve been having for decades. Every generation thinks theirs was the last good one. Joan Wasser said in an interview recently that “real lovers of music, not just casual listeners appreciate well-crafted songs. So I may just be a dinosaur saying that’s never going to go out of style, but that’s fine.”

But that answer was placed in response to the following: “Wasser belongs to what increasingly seems to be a dying breed of songwriters, artists who care deeply about the craft.” I can’t say that I see a basis for this take at all. Even on an international scale, who are Phoebe Bridgers, Adrianne Lenker, Cameron Winter, MJ Lenderman, if not young songwriters who care about their craft?

I just don’t think things are in a dire state of affairs when it comes to creative output. At all. I think in Ireland and internationally we’re consistently seeing new, groundbreaking, unique, powerful art and music being made all the time. It’s all the structures around it that are fucked. Which makes the existence of every song and painting all the more miraculous!

On that note, here is my 2025 - Apple Music Playlist (best on shuffle). Apple doesn’t embed playlists like Spotify, strike one.

And we’ll leave it on a note of Christmassy-cheer! Usually I post a Christmas song a day on Instagram like an indie-music advent calendar. I didn’t get to it this year, not because I’m offline in a chic and alluring way, but because I’m offline in a tired, hungover, and cosy way. But here is last year’s advent calendar:

And here are some more Christmassy-and-Christmas-adjacent-cosy tunes for December: ‎Nollaig 🎄- Apple Music.

Nollaig Shona! ‘Tis the season and if you’d like to share some goodwill or joy please consider donating or volunteering with the Bohemians’ annual Toy Drive or coming out on Wednesday 1pm for the 10k for The Gaza Food and Play Project with Kneecap and Run for Palestine Dublin (it’s my first 10k, light a candle!).

But mostly thank you for being here! Thank you to all the people who reply and share and chat about my hyperfixations with me! Thank you for reading even the 18-min long meadering Ispíní interview! Thank you to all the artists and interesting people who shared their time and thoughts with me over the past few months!

Grá mór,
Emma

xx