A selection of Aldous Harding’s favourite songs: “The most beautiful thing I’d ever heard”
Aldous Harding doesn’t feel like a musician. The New Zealand-born singer-songwriter has always bristled at the term, feeling that there’s more to a musician’s work than just the music. Which she’s right about, by the way. If a musician’s appeal began and ended with the music, why would we relate to them? Why would we go to concerts when the records are right there? Why would we be reading about them on this very website? Fittingly enough, since Aldous Harding is a stage name, the artist born Hannah Topp considers herself more of an actor.
On the surface, this seems strange. Harding herself is the daughter of folk singer Lorina Harding so music is quite literally in her blood. This isn’t a case of trying to flee from her heritage either as the music video for Harding’s single ‘Horizon’, her first for label 4AD, was made in collaboration with her mother, from whom she derives her stage name. Instead, it has more to do with embodying the power of what a song can do to someone, both the listener and the writer.
She’s talked about songs coming to her in trances. In that same interview with Pitchfork, she spoke of songs not being created by her but uncovered. “I feel like the songs are like secrets that the muse is keeping from me,“ she says. “I have to listen, and then it tells me where the gaps in the universe are, and then I try to fill them with good intentions”.
In another interview with NPR, Harding uncharacteristically went into a deep dive on the songs that inspired her in the same way. She spoke of being around eight years old and being given a big purple bag full of cassette tapes by a family friend.
She was meant to try all of them but stopped when she heard Seals and Crofts’ ‘Summer Breeze’. As she puts it, “I was like, well, I’m not going to find anything better than this. I just thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard”. Not everyone agreed though, as her mum took one listen to it and said, “Jesus, can you turn that off“.
Later in life, she discovered Vashti Bunyan, more specifically, finding solace in the track ‘Diamond Day‘ from Just Another Diamond Day. “It was kind of the record that I put on to ease my angst when I was 18 or 19 — to escape into [a world that was] slightly softer”. This is music not just to listen to or even to relate to. This is music as a world all of its own, something that she tries to create with her own work to this day.
As she entered her early adulthood, she made the discovery that all of us make at some point, that Paul was the best Beatle! Her favourite song, detailed in the NPR interview is ‘Single Pigeon‘ by Paul McCartney—a track she defines as one she wished she had written. The song, for all its classicism and structure, still “drops your shoulder, takes out your knee, and then builds you back up”.
The ultimate compliment came when she covered it live, and actively asked someone in the audience to film her performing the song “just to have an excuse to hear it again!”
All of this comes together in her own music. ‘Living the Classics‘ from her 2017 album Party is a tribute to all of these disparate influences and her trying to live up to them. She said the song “is probably my most confident song because even though I’m saying I’d like to try it — I’m also saying I’m going to do it“. Something which all of us can do in our own way, let the music we love change us and then at least try to make something worthy of it.
A collection of Aldous Harding’s favourite songs:
- Seals and Croft – ‘Summer Breeze’
- Vashti Bunyan – ‘Diamond Day’
- Paul McCartney – ‘Single Pigeon’
- Aldous Harding – ‘Living the Classics’
