In 1995, Paul Winter proved himself to be friend of all the animals.
“If you spend a long time in a wild place, you hear things…”
Paul Winter won the New Age Grammy Award twice in a row – first in 1994 for Spanish Angel, a live album he recorded with his Consort. The very next year, he was proudly clutching that gilded gramophone yet again. This means that not only does Paul hold the record for most New Age Grammies overall, he’s also the only artist to ever win the award consecutively.
Today we’re revisiting the 1995 Grammy Awards, in which Paul Winter took home the New Age gong through offering a Prayer for the Wild Things.
You’ll like this one. So let’s listen and learn, together.
This is a roundup of some of the New Age albums I’ve found by chance while out and about – usually in charity shops.
It’s common to find albums by Enya and Enigma in second hand shops. But if you’re lucky, you’ll find something more unusual – something you probably would never have encountered by any other means.
We’re not talking about those omnipresent Pan Pipe Tribute to the Beatles albums. Who buys those, and why? Even I have my standards. Though I regret not buying one I recently found called Ocean Tchaikovsky – the composer’s melodies set to ocean waves. What might have been.
I was going to call this series – for it will be a series – Car Boot New Age, as a tribute to Nightmares on Wax. But I am yet to find any New Age music at a car boot sale. One day. One day.
There’s a game some people like to play whenever Coachella unveils the lineup of that year’s festival. You can work out your “musical age” by subtracting from 80 the number of names you recognise on the poster.
Based on the 2025 poster, my musical age is 46. But if I were to calculate it based on the number of acts I’d be interested in watching… hmm!
See for yourself:
The higher your “musical age”, the more you might relate to what follows.
Reminder: NAGCHAMPA = New Age Grammy Challenge: Healing Assessments of Musicians Perceived as Awful.
Following my foolhardy metal quest, I feel like I need some quiet and visionary music as badly as I sometimes need a cup of tea and a flapjack.
It’s been five years. But if you remember, I’m studying every album that ever won the Grammy Award for Best New Age Album, in an attempt to understand what makes New Age Music so New Age. The closest I came to a definition was this: New Age Music is applied ambient music. Or, it’s spiritual ambience. It’s music that aims to make you feel better, and succeeds.
But while my back was turned, the Grammy guys broadened the scope of this awards. Since 2023, the category has been “Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album”.
“Ambient” I get, but “chant”? Will there be chanting? Was there always chanting?
I swear, I had no idea that the 2025 Grammy Awards were taking place as I wrote this thing. The BBC didn’t even include the New Age category in their roundup of the winners. It looks like it went to Wouter Kellerman, Eru Matsumoto, and Chandrika Tandon’s Triveni. A worthy winner? We’ll see, when I finally get to 2025 in this project, some 16 years from now.
Because we’ve only just made it to 1994 here, and it’s Paul Winter’s time to shine.
The Monsters of Rock lay down their arms as a rabid dog approached the battlefield looking for a pat on the head. The Download Festival was born.
Why “Download”? Because at the time, people thought that downloading was killing music. So to label a music festival against such a force of evil was a daring move, presumably. Because that’s what metal’s all about: SHOCK. But it raises the question: If the Download Festival were started in 2023 rather than 2003, would they have called it the Streaming Festival?
I’ve only been once, and even then I only went for one day. It was 2019, and the opportunity to see Tool and Smashing Pumpkins on the same day was too good to miss. It was a beautiful day. Everyone was friendly, and everyone was there for the music. I saw more devil horns than smartphones held aloft, and the bars had the Iron Maiden Trooper ale on tap.
Also, Download has a mascot: The Download Dog. He started life looking like an unfortunate victim of experiments in canine ESP. Over the years, he’s also appeared as a sort of FrankenDog, as a snarling pink puppy, and as a skeleton. When he makes public appearances, though, he’s a giant red naked bodybuilder with studded bracelets who, despite his leer and his bulging muscles, looks to be quite cuddly.
All festivals should have a mascot. The Glastonbury Wizard. The Reading Bookworm. The Latitude Accountant. In fact, every business and brand in the land should have a mascot. They help, in a way.
So I’m down with The Download Festival. And that’s why I decided to listen to every band and artist that ever played Download Festival. What else am I going to do with my Spotify subscription?
I read about music a lot. I’m sure most music critics are wonderful people in real life. I’m sure they’re polite to retail workers, and that they’re patient and conscientious drivers, and that they’re silent and respectful of their fellow passengers when using public transport.
But in my experience, in their writing many music critics come across as miserable hand-wringers at best, or smug, self-righteous and self-serving sadists at worst. And no matter where they sit on this tedious spectrum, most music critics seem driven not by a desperate, obsessive love of music, but by an inexplicable desire to drain all the joy from the most vital, universal, and transcendent of artforms.
And yet, I often write about music. I’d do it more often if I had the time. How do I sleep at night?
We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.
Merry Christmas, everyone. I’ve chosen to give up despair. It’s still terrible out there, and it seems to get worse every year. But despair is a total waste of time and energy. Take care of yourself. Be there for the people who need you, and commit to making your own world better. What more could anyone ask of you?
Anyway, this is my annual roundup of my favourite albums of the year. As usual, I’m focusing on the stuff that’s new to me, or that I don’t feel will get featured in many other year-end roundups. And the roundups I’ve seen so far – gracious! Far too many seem resigned to wallow.
I’m raising my glass, though, to offerings from certain perennial favourites: Bat For Lashes, The Cure, Elbow, Mercury Rev, The Smile (twice!), Goat, Kamasi Washington, John Cale, Jon Anderson, David Gilmour and, above absolutely everyone and everything else, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. We don’t deserve him.
Also, I suggest you listen to Civil Service. They know what they’re doing.
Every year, as the August Bank Holiday weekend approaches, the Shiiine On Festival shares an old Reading & Leeds lineup to their Instagram.
Something like this:
You can imagine the comments. Some just offer a single word. “Classic,” or similar. Some share fond memories. This is often something along the lines of, “I can’t remember much but I’m told I had a good time”. They were drunk, you see.
But others say something along the lines of “what happened?”
And you get similar comments whenever Reading and Leeds post lineup updates to their own social media profiles. “What happened?”
According to Spotify Wrapped, I listened to 14,791 songs in 2023.
One thing I didn’t like from Spotify Wrapped was this:
Apparently, Spotify considers you to be some kind of mysterious shaman if you listen to albums all the way through – that is, if you approach the art as the artist attended.
Boo to that. I’m far from a purist, but I don’t like how disposable things feel these days.
All Tomorrow’s Parties (ATP) was a series of festivals held between 1999 and 2016.
These festivals were remarkable for a number of reasons. First, their lineups were almost entirely hand-picked by a guest curator, who was usually a musician. Second, many of the festivals took place in the most refined environments possible – Butlin’s holiday camps! Yes, this means that for one glorious evening it was possible to see Patti Smith play on a stage usually used for knobbly knees contests.
