Here’s another blog subject to go in the list of “the last song from albums I’ll never be covering again on this place”. I feel like there’s been a lot of those recently. If this is your first time reading up on a song from Dananananaykroyd’s There Is a Way here, the short story of my experience with it is I downloaded the album a few days after its release, after finding out about the first single from the album on – I’m pretty sure – the morning after my last GCSE exam in 2011. There Is a Way got very, very minimal coverage, both commercially and critically. Pitchfork reviewed the band’s debut album. I thought they’d review There Is a Way. They did not. I wouldn’t be surprised if millions of people didn’t know this album exists. But I at least hope that writing about nine of its 11 tracks on this site gives you incentive to check it out and make your own thoughts on it. For me, the album still sounds as fresh now as it did… 15 years ago. Jesus. My favourite album of theirs out of the two they made.

Finally getting a physical copy of There Is a Way only a couple years ago really opened my eyes as to what the songs on it were about. Up until 2024, I was singing along, but only with words that I thought I was hearing or mildly comprehensible. I’ve probably made a point in previous posts about how the Glaswegian accents of Gunn and Baillie Jnr come through strongly in their singing numerous times. And that’s only because the point is true. Lyrics sites had no idea what was going on. There are only a couple which now have the right lyrics, and that’s because I uploaded them myself. I mean, the song was always obviously about a time capsule, but I can make a strong deduction now that one of the bandmembers dug a capsule up – most likely John Baillie Jnr ’cause he wrote the lyrics – found a diary in it and was inspired enough to relay its entries and the overall time capsule-finding experience into the form of a song. Baillie Jnr finds a delightful interest in the trivial things his ancestors got up to back in the day and puts it on himself to carry on the family name, tributing his hometown of Glasgow in the process.

‘Time Capsule’ is a track on There Is a Way that I remember liking from the first listen. I once threw out a comment on a post the band made on their Facebook page, requesting the song be the next single. My comment probably had no relation to what the band posted. It wasn’t to be, because the band released ‘Think and Feel’ as the second single and then broke up not too long afterwards. It was a sad, sad situation. The split, I mean, not that my request got “snubbed”. But I honestly thought ‘Time Capsule’ had everything that the public would enjoy. It had the “Time Capsu-all” hook, sang in unison by vocalists Calum Gunn and John Baillie Jnr, that quick-fire scale-demonstration guitar riff on the right-hand side by guitarist David Roy. Paul Carlin’s working those drums, makes the track’s momentum feel very busy, always moving forward. There Is a Way is a ball of energy up to and including ‘Time Capsule’. You think the band have to let up at some point. And they do. After ending the song with a climactic finish where the band go into half-time, hammering the aforementioned guitar riff home until the song collapses in on itself, a bubble pop transitions the listener into what I’m guessing is a field recording outside the studio that lasts for about a minute. Just to let you have a little breather, I think. A great way to close out the album’s first half.