‘Repeater' is the fifth album by the band Fingerless.
It was recorded mainly in Jeff Lovejoy’s studio Black Box Recording, with some tasteful overdubs done in my dodgy home studio. The title of the album has a bit more meaning than you might think. The life of a musician is full of repetition: listening to the same song(s) or artist(s) over and over again, learning/practicing an instrument is just playing the same thing(s) over and over again, writing a song is just playing a riff or chord progression over and over again until you find a lyric or melody or whatever that goes with it, writing lyrics feels like saying the same thing over and over again—and don’t even get me started on the recording/mixing/mastering process.
More than this, though, most of the songs on this album seem (to me, at least) to circle around the same topic: human connection and hope. We need this. We’ve always needed this, and we always will. We’re all repeaters, in the end. Some of these songs were written during the extended post-2020 malaise, while others were written before COVID, and still others were written more recently. But for whatever reason these songs ended up being about things people share; moments, lifetimes, tears, fears, ambition, jealousy, jokes, stories and legacies. None of this is new, we tell the same stories to each other over and over again; we all feed the same stream. But, nevertheless, there’s always more to come, more to share, more to lament. More of the same? Probably. But does that make it any less meaningful?
Playing and believing, tell me something more revealing.
Taking and repeating, building something more appealing.