The boy who came to visit last week was talking about this album. I had an inkling I had it perhaps, but then I thought, no, I don’t have that, I have some other Gary Wilson thing. So he played it to me on his iPod on a cloudy, sticky Tuesday morning and it synthesized just right with the air around us. It wasn’t pretty music, it was tired and awkward, but it was beautiful in that sleepy way that Ariel Pink’s music is beautiful: beautiful like real stuff, like hair and feet and blemishes can be. We chose not to dwell too on the obsessive quality of the lyrics and the vulnerable vocals that were coming out of someone a lot older than us, ’cause it felt a litle creepy. Then he left, and I made a note to find Mary Had Brown Hair somewhere.

This morning I was dallying with my head in the CD boxes kind of under the shelves, where I put stuff marked NOT NOW BUT NOT NEVER, looking for the unreleased album by a band I used to be in back in 2001 (I had reasons for this, but they would take a while to explain). And there was Mary Had Brown Hair. A finished copy. Hidden under some other things, but it was there. I don’t remember ever being sent it. I don’t remember it at all. This suits its transience, its loneliness, its one-track-mindedness as much as it’s testament to my uselessness, and as I picked it out of the box and put it on I chose to believe that things had happened so that I’d find it on this particular Sunday and that, in fact, the timing was perfect indeed.