Random Rules: Murray Lightburn
In Random Rules, The A.V. Club asks some of its favorite people to set their MP3 players to shuffle and comment on the first few tracks that come up—no cheating or skipping embarrassing tracks allowed.
The shuffler: Murray Lightburn is the singer, guitarist, and chief songwriter for Canadian band The Dears, whose recent Gang Of Losers is one of 2006's finest albums. His laptop contains lots of his own music.
The Dears, "Money"
Murray Lightburn: The title written here is "Money," but it's obviously not the Floyd song. It's a demo with no vocals, of basically one chord progression played over and over with about seven guitar tracks on it.
The A.V. Club: Why do you put it on your computer? So you can listen to it and write lyrics?
ML: Sort of. Right now, I'm just tweaking the tail-end. This is the main tune, and out of this process, there'll be, like… Oh, there's the chorus, here it comes, boom. I've written some lyrics, and it's about—um, actually, I don't know what it's about.
The Dears, "Lost In The Plot"
ML: Aw, goddamn, see, this is what I'm talking about. I should've erased all of the Dears-y stuff, because it's gonna come up so often. I actually downloaded this because I didn't have a copy of the album. I wanted to put it in my phone as a ringtone.
AVC: So when your phone rings, you hear your own song?