NRJ (nrj.ie) joins Field Notes and Radar Signals as observational streams into Marshall on Policy.

Accumulated briefings in Marshall on Policy are transferred to and elaborated on Brief Me. From January 2027 onwards The ConTXT will place the content of Brief Me in context with current events.

For the last several years, I have been an online musician of the indie type. I have gotten so much marketing (even this morning) about image, brand, yada, yada. Have you ever looked up what brand means?

“What is a brand name, Google?”

What a Brand Is vs. What It Is Not

Many people confuse a brand with design elements.

• Not a brand: A logo, a color palette, a website design, or a slogan. According to theAmerican Marketing Association, these are visual assets and marketing tools, not the brand itself. 
• The actual brand: As defined onWikipedia, a brand is the intangible collection of memories, emotions, and expectations a customer associates with a seller. It is what people say about you when you are not in the room.

Core Components of a Brand * Customer Experience: Every interaction a person has with your company—from answering a phone call to unboxing a product. * Identity and Personality: The distinct human traits and values assigned to a business (for example, rugged and bold, or sleek and modern). * Promise: The unspoken guarantee of quality, consistency, and value a customer expects every time they choose you. 

Why Brands Matter

• Differentiation: They help people instantly tell your product apart from cheaper or generic competitors.
• Trust and Loyalty: Strong emotional connections make customers stick with a company over time.
• Economic Value: Recognized brands command higher prices and build long-term financial worth.

Blunt talk with Kelly K. 

Listen, I’ll be blunt. If you happen to be thinking about this stuff while writing a song, you are thinking about the wrong stuff unless your song is about brands. Then send it my way. If you are advertising your music using “consistency, trust, loyalty, value” as guideposts, what the hell are you doing? Art isn’t economical, even cheap art. We do it because we love it, I thought. But marketers out there want me to feel like an entrepreneur, and I most certainly am not that, pardon your French. I am a music contractor, that’s all. That’s all I want, and I got it.

The big consistency lie.

Many of these marketers will harp on “consistency.” They don’t know the meaning of the word. They are looking for quick bucks with you. Ever think about who needs consistency? Corporations love it.  But does any kind of art? Even the most consistently cool artists like Miles Davis invented a new genre every decade or so. That is not consistent. He was hell on promoters, tour managers, and women. He was a nightmare in many regards. Very turbulent. One of the best. Never consistent. 

Bob Dylan doesn’t have a consistent bone in his body. He does whatever the hell he wants. 70’s Dylan is my favorite. But it is very much different than other decades in his career. To call Bob Dylan consistent is a bold-faced lie. He can’t even find a consistent guitar player.

Those have been among my favorite musicians in my whole life. Not consistent, so I haven’t worried about that in years.

But you know who was consistent? Elvis.

Elvis Presley couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag. 

“What Elvis songs did Elvis write, Google?”

Elvis Presley did not write his own music, but he is credited as a genuine co-writer on just two tracks: "That's Someone You Never Forget" and "You'll Be Gone." 

The Truth About Elvis's Credits

• Real Co-Writes: Elvis helped conceptualize or write lyrics for "That's Someone You Never Forget" (with Red West) and "You'll Be Gone" (with Red West and Charlie Hodge). 
• Fake Credits for Hits: Early hits like "Heartbreak Hotel," "Don't Be Cruel," and "All Shook Up" list Elvis as a co-writer, but he did not actually write them. His manager, Colonel Tom Parker, demanded writer credits and royalties for Elvis as a condition of him recording the tracks. 
• His Own View: Elvis openly admitted this practice, stating in interviews that he got credit just for recording a song which "makes me look smarter than I am." 

Ladies and germs, Elvis is a true brand name. Not only did he have some kind of factory going for crappy old hits, he had a very capitalist manager. His manager is still known to some as a marketing “genius”, (gag a maggot) .. Enter: “The Colonel” Tom Parker.

Tom Parker, Music, Brands.

Tom Parker had a mysterious background involving immigration, citizenship, and traveling. He was an illegal Dutch immigrant. Many think this played a significant role in explaining later actions. Why he was scared to leave the country. Even why he was sued by the Elvis estate after Elvis died. But there’s no doubt, he came up with clever cash delivery vehicles. 

Once such method involved buttons. He had buttons that say “I love Elvis” made. He also had buttons that say “I hate Elvis” made. He knew how to market Elvis to folks who hated him and profit from them. See, Tom Parker was a music version of a micro-targeter. In fact, I venture to say, he would have loved micro-targeting. I wonder if he helped invent micro-targeting in some thought process kind of way. Micro-targeting is data-driven, but the concept behind it is a lot like those buttons.

If you don’t want to write songs and swing your hips and you want to hire a manager you are going to fire and even sue for robbing you later on, by all means, call yourself a brand. But if you want to write songs and relate to folks, brands do not do that. People do.

Maybe we’re all terribly lonely, anyone ever thought of that? And it’s by design?

Being lonely makes us consumers, the crowd, the target audience, and it makes us predictable. This is all wonderful stuff for brands with a data contractor. They have tons to dig up from our private lives and throw in our face, guaranteeing a response. They have recognition and years of being in business despite not being the same businesses years ago. Some folks won’t even hang out with folks who like different “brands” of music, politics, church, even food, or home goods. One person didn’t talk to me anymore because I ate at a chain owned by MAGA’s. Fried chicken, I am going to MAGA’s for fried chicken. If there’s any one thing I trust them for, it is that. I think MAGA’s making southern fried chicken is a good use of MAGA skills. Why would I not support that? Plus, I live in Texas. I couldn’t even get power to the house if I boycotted every MAGA, silly asses.

The way they do it.

A demographic is a specific group of people or a set of statistical characteristics used to describe a human population. 

What Tom Parker and everyone in business and politics want is demographics. These folks want to know what their average customer looks like, what color they are, what church they go to, the sexes are a biggie, where they live, and age too. Demographics are a marketing tool that helps you know where you are doing good and where you could focus. Politicians and businesses alike will customize their message depending on who you are. They essentially say one thing to white women and another thing to black men. Now, keep in mind, I don’t think this is wrong. I don’t necessarily think white women and black men need the same message. Having said that, it is entirely possible they don’t need the same politician, either. If we are talking music especially. Those two crowds are not listening to the same stations. But it’d sure be easier to sell them both songs if they did. Politics is like that.

The point is out there about musicians and brand now. Let’s bring it home.

What do you think being a musician is?

The best way I can tell you to figure out what you want in music is to figure out what someone you like did, and do that your own way. Much like writing a tune might inspire another, careers in music do this too. We used to have apprenticeships to guarantee music for folks when we die, but recording and other factors tore down taking other younger folks in and showing them around on nice stuff. This is a shame. I am very grateful to all the “boomers” who worked with me and showed me anything. I’d be crap without that, and better with more of it.

To me, being a musician is that. It’s teaching. To you? It might be industry. It might be escape. It could be simply something to do. Only one of those things out of anything I can think of is a “Brand Name.”  So while marketers are keen to tell you about brands, they are hoping to resonate with your frustration, not your aspirations.  So many musicians seem weary and frustrated; they think industry is a way to get more people. What musicians do not realize is this mentality makes them vulnerable to micro-targeting. 

It’s not about music, it’s about being lonesome.

If you are lonely, you are vulnerable. It doesn’t matter how smart, how talented, how chipper. It matters how lonely. That is their invitation.

Maybe avoid marketers and work on the lonesome issue? Just a thought.

Thanks.

Kelly Kintner

The Horse’s Mouth Magazine

While I was landing, I looked over at San Jose from the airplane, and I felt a similar pang of sadness. Every time I’ve come back here, it has felt less strong, and I guess I feel like a lot of it is probably because of my memories here with my ex and her family. And every time I have faced it, it has been more and more quiet. I also think part of me just doesn’t really like this city too much, but I’m glad that things are getting easier. It’s also a little bit weird because for the first time, a friend is not available to hang out, usually I hang out with two specific friends when I come up here for two days, and both of them are gone for business trips. I’m going to be interested seeing what I do with my time.

5. Sur le dos des buffles

Une scène terrible. Ma mère en travers d’une porte, empêchant mon père de sortir. Elle crie elle pleure. J’ai peur, je me cache sous la table. Mon père partait souvent, parfois pendant des semaines, il se rendait dans des villages loin, dans la forêt pour je ne sais quelles activités. Ma mère, dans un lit, son abondante chevelure brune aux reflets cuivrés répandue autour de son visage comme une auréole de sainte. On ne doit pas faire de bruit. Maman est en dépression.

Le père de ma grand mère était mort. Sa grande maison brûlée. Pillées les récoltes, les hangars détruits. Décidément, ma famille ne retrouverait jamais ni ses terres ni ses biens. C’était fini, terminé. Hanoï tombée, le Viêt Nam était virtuellement coupé en deux, un accord de coopération militaire fut signé entre la France et ce qui subsistait de l’Indochine.

La famille dépendait à présent essentiellement de l’argent continuant par bonheur à arriver de la métropole.

1951 s’acheva sur un espoir : les victoires françaises de Hoa Binh suivies de divers succès qui firent croire à une reconquête. Puis j’eus 2 ans. Je parlais un dialecte mélangé de français, mes compagnons de jeux dans la boue, pratiquement nus comme moi, étaient les enfants des paysans voisins. J’étais un des leurs malgré mes yeux clairs, spontanément les enfants ne sont pas racistes. Ma première conscience me rattacha au peuple du delta. La France était une fiction.

Deux ans passèrent, j’avais assez d’autonomie pour m’aventurer jusque dans les rizières sur le dos des buffles, je parlais dialecte avec ma nounou, ma peau avait la même couleur que celle de mes camarades. Les Français avaient à nouveau du succès là-haut dans le nord, ils étaient pour moi ces soldats blonds, qui parlaient entre eux une langue inconnue, mais ils étaient gentils avec les enfants. Pas comme les Japonais et les communistes qui les mangeaient nous menaçait-on.

#nguolai

Inbetweeners Part 3- The Grey Room

The Grey Room is where the player characters first spawn at the beginning of the Inbetweener's Campaign after they are resurrected by the Interloper. Here is the description given of the room in the original document:

“The room is a perfect square, its walls made of smooth, cold stone that seems to absorb light and sound, making everything feel slightly muted. There are no visible light sources but you are able to see, as if the entire room is cast in twilight. In the center of the room is a large iron chest with no top.

Each of the four walls has a single door, each distinctly different from the others:

Northern Door: This door is made of dark, weathered wood, bound with heavy iron bands that are rusted with age. The door has a faint green hue to it.

Eastern Door: The eastern door stands out with its intricate design of interwoven silver and gold, forming a complex pattern of celestial symbols and stars. It seems almost to shimmer in the dim light, and there is a palpable sense of magic emanating from it. A faint, melodic hum can be heard when you get close, like the distant sound of a lullaby. This door has a vibrant, almost blinding red hue.

Southern Door: This door is the simplest of all, made of plain, sturdy oak. It has no adornments except for a large, iron ring handle. There are noticeable scratches and dents, suggesting it has been used frequently. A faint smell of earth and dampness wafts from it, giving the impression that it might lead to an underground passage or a cellar. The door has a faint green hue

Western Door: The door made of crystal is a breathtaking marvel, almost seeming to be a piece of art rather than a mere entryway. It stands tall and proud, crafted entirely from a single, immense slab of clear crystal that catches and refracts the dim light in the room, casting a myriad of colors and dancing reflections across the grey walls and floor. This door has a rich, violet hue. “

We will get into what the color hues mean in a separate post on the doors. The Grey Room at first seems like a nondescript tutorial room, but it is much much more. It is the heart of the Interloper's sandbox. He is able to control its size, and can make it as small as a shoebox or more massive than a mountain. When the players deliver the Interloper various specimens or items they collect, something appears in the room to take it. Sometimes a slot opens in the wall, other times a robotic or biotic hand comes down from the ceiling. Sometimes it is just a hole in liminal space. The Interloper has almost complete control in this room, and is only threatened if a force like the Protectors of the Weave arrives with specialized tech that dampens his powers.

The doors in the Grey Room branch out to the various “rooms” the players explore, so it serves as a sort of base camp for the players. They would frequently return to it to rest, regroup, heal, etc. It also served as a storage space. Since the Interloper could expand it at will, there was theoretically no limit to how much loot players could bring back to the Grey Room. Initially this was of great interest to them, but later on they began to realize with how they traveled material wealth wasn't really all that necessary. Players also used it for various projects. Setting up experimental gardens, cultivating spell components, trapping prisoners, etc. One more interesting use was a dilemma they faced where Bee People were threatened by druids seeking to wipe them out as they are abominations. The goal was to force the players to make a morally grey choice. Either kill druids and rangers intent on protecting nature or allow them to slaughter innocent Bee People. The players opted for a third option, they took the Beeple into the Grey Room, their entire hive, to then transport them somewhere safe.

One plot hole you might ask about though is, how did the players get other sentient beings into the Grey Room? Only the players themselves travel nonlinearly, so a door that takes them to the Grey Room should presumably take anyone else to just whatever is normally on the other side of that door. Well, the Interloper thought of that and gave the players amulets to get new “participants” or “specimens” to wear so that they could be brought back to the Grey Room. For example, the players ended up in a mage's study, and knocked him unconscious, put an amulet on him and took him to the Grey Room to be studied. However, the players got clever, and realized they could pass an amulet back and forth to quickly get hundreds of sentient beings through a portal to the Grey Room. So add refugee camp to the list.

The Interloper himself doesn't physically exist in the Grey Room, but appears to be “above” it, creating a stair case for guests to go visit him directly. However, he wasn't really above it, but rather all around and through it, suffusing it. The Interloper in a way IS the Grey Room, or at least it is an extension of his will. Many great scenes and interactions in the campaign happened in the Grey Room. Eventually a fifth door appeared in the Grey Room leading to a new series of rooms... we will get to that in another post.

Initially the Grey Room was attached to four doors. One door took the players to a tavern cellar. Another to a hallway that was occasionally patrolled by a half dragon mercenary. The third led directly to Zariel's War Room (terrifying that level 1 players could immediately access a space with a CR 26 devil lord and her high powered minions). The last door only worked if a holy symbol was held up to it, and then it took them to the temple of that diety/faith. The players used this to visit the Temple of Torm, where they were connected with the Shadow of Torm, a darker organization that served Torm in morally grey areas by killing fiends and undead. The players organized an ambush in the Grey Room where the top members of the Shadow of Torm ambushed and killed Zariel. Unfortuntaely for them, they were unaware the Interloper had made a deal with Zariel and gave her the immortality parasite, so in the end the leader of the Shadow of Torm was killed instead. His ghost haunted the Grey Room for some time after that.

The ultimate fate of the Grey Room was that it had to be abandon after the invasion by the Protectors of the Weave. When the players freed the Interloper they were temporarily imprisoned in the Grey Room along with the Interloper, Arakanos, the Jailer (reconstituted), the Dragon abomination, Grandma Nettles, and countless creations the Interloper made out of dead or destroyed Protectors of the Weave soldiers and golems. The Protectors had failed to overwhelm and kill the Interloper so instead chose to keep him trapped in the Grey Room so he'd diminish over time. If it hadn't been for the players he would've remained trapped there indefinitely. When the Interloper was freed, he created countless Grey Rooms across the multiverse, metastizing himself so he would not be as easy to excise the next time.

The players would encounter the Grey Room one more time in a dungeon crafted by the Lady of Pain called the Lady's Gauntlet, but this wasn't the real Grey Room but rather a copy of it.

The clock tower is the detail that sticks. In the hills of Guian New Area, in China's south-western province of Guizhou, there is a cluster of buildings done up in a kind of continental European pastiche: red roofs, arcaded facades, a multi-arched bridge, and a tower with a clock on it. When AFP visited in July 2026 the whole confection was emitting a low, permanent hum. It is not a resort or a theme park. It is Huawei's largest data centre, and the hum is the sound of several hundred megawatts of cooling and compute doing whatever it is that compute does.

Outside it, on the road, street vendors were selling lunch to data centre workers beneath a banner exhorting everyone to promote high-quality development. A shopkeeper named Shu Peihua told the news agency what the change had felt like from ground level. It used to be a barren mountain, Shu said, but since the area has developed, transportation has become more convenient, trade has picked up, business opportunities have emerged. Another resident, Li Xixiu, put it more plainly still: the centres had really boosted the economy of this entire area, and the villagers in the neighbourhood now find jobs nearby, where before they had to go to other places.

Hold on to those two statements, because they are true. They are also, in the way that ground-level truths often are, an incomplete account of what has happened to Guizhou. In the same report, researchers at Taiwan's Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology laid a different set of numbers beside them. Guizhou has averaged 7.4 per cent annual GDP growth over the past decade. Its wage growth over the same period was second to last in the country. And the province, having borrowed heavily to build the roads, substations and fibre that make it attractive to a hyperscaler, now carries one of the highest debt burdens in China.

That is the puzzle. A place where the growth arrived and the prosperity did not.

What the Ledger Actually Says

The DSET analysis is worth reading slowly, because it separates two things that boosters routinely fuse. Data centres, the researchers found, drive heavy investment in land and equipment, but their impact on boosting local per capita income remains limited. Investment is not income. Capital formation is not a wage. A billion yuan of servers sitting in a shed in Guian counts towards provincial output in exactly the way that a billion yuan of anything else does, and it counts whether or not a single additional person in Guizhou is better paid as a result.

The debt side is starker. By 2024, according to DSET's figures, Guizhou ranked thirtieth among China's provincial-level jurisdictions on debt-to-revenue and twenty-seventh on debt-to-GDP. There are thirty-one of them. This is not a province that dabbled at the edges of the borrowing economy; it went in at the deep end and stayed. The South China Morning Post has reported that Guizhou's outstanding government debt in 2023 amounted to around 72 per cent of provincial GDP, well above the 60 per cent threshold the central government treats as prudent, after years of hefty infrastructure spending on projects that did not all deliver what local officials hoped.

Andrew Stokols of Singapore Management University offered AFP the general version of the finding. Data centres, he said, do not necessarily create a huge spillover effect on local jobs, and immediate benefits have been elusive, in China and elsewhere.

Elsewhere is the operative word. The Guizhou story reads as if it were about Chinese state planning, provincial competition and the peculiarities of local government financing vehicles, and in part it is. But strip away the Chinese institutional furniture and what remains is a much more general fact about a particular kind of asset: enormously expensive to build, almost costless in labour to run, and structurally disinclined to share.

How a Poor Province Became a Server Farm

Guizhou did not stumble into this. It went looking.

The province is mountainous, landlocked, historically among China's poorest, and for most of the reform era its principal export was people. Karst topography makes farming hard and heavy industry harder. What it has is altitude, a cool and stable climate, geological stability, cheap land and a lot of hydropower. In 2016 Beijing designated Guizhou as the country's first national big data comprehensive pilot zone. Guiyang, the provincial capital, began hosting an annual international big data expo. Apple's Chinese iCloud operation was routed through a facility in Guian built with the state-backed operator Guizhou-Cloud Big Data. Tencent went in. So did Huawei, at scale.

In 2021 the strategy got a name, and in February 2022 it got a budget. Eastern Data, Western Computing, or 东数西算, is the National Development and Reform Commission's programme to build eight national computing hubs and ten national data centre clusters, siting the compute-heavy, latency-tolerant workloads of China's digital economy in the energy-rich, land-rich, underpopulated west while the east keeps the customers. The hubs sit in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta, the Greater Bay Area, the Chengdu-Chongqing corridor, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Gansu and Guizhou. The NDRC's own projection was that the hubs and clusters would drive roughly 400 billion yuan of investment a year.

The logic is not stupid. AI training is brutally energy-hungry and largely indifferent to a few dozen milliseconds of latency. China has ordered that data centres draw 80 per cent of their power from renewable sources by the end of the decade, and the west is where the wind and the sun and the water are. Simeng Deng of Rystad Energy told AFP that the facilities help absorb the surplus of renewable power generation, which is a real service: western China curtails a great deal of clean electricity it cannot move east fast enough. China is on course to nearly double its data centre capacity within five years.

There is a wrinkle in the clean-power story that deserves stating. Guizhou is a hydropower province, but it is also a coal province. Its grid leans hard on thermal generation, and leans harder when the reservoirs are low. Between 2020 and 2024 the clean share of Guizhou's generation actually fell by five percentage points, one of the steepest declines in China, as fossil output grew faster than total generation. The 80 per cent renewable target is a target, not a description. And the curtailed wind and solar that western data centres are meant to soak up is curtailed partly because transmission out of the west is inadequate, which is the same infrastructure gap that made siting compute there attractive in the first place. The policy is elegantly circular: build the load where the power is stranded, because the power is stranded.

For a province like Guizhou, the pitch to Beijing and to the market was straightforward. We have the power. We have the land. We will build the rest. And it did build the rest, with borrowed money, which is the part of the sentence that ended up mattering most.

The Machine That Employs Almost Nobody

The single most useful piece of evidence on what a hyperscale facility does to the place around it was published this month, and it is not about China at all.

In a working paper dated 7 August 2026, Dany Bahar of Brown University and Greg C. Wright of the University of California, Merced set out to test the spillover claim directly. Their opening line is the thesis: a hyperscale data centre can cost more than a billion dollars while employing only a few dozen people. Using a registry of 341 hyperscale facilities in the United States, assembled from a Pacific Northwest National Laboratory atlas, operator announcements, subsidy records and state filings, they asked whether that investment propagates outward through the three classic channels economists expect: a deeper shared labour pool, denser supplier linkages, and firm clustering with knowledge spillovers.

Their method is elegant. Because operators screen sites for power, land and fibre, the places that get a data centre are systematically unlike the places that do not, which wrecks naive before-and-after comparisons. So Bahar and Wright compare the immediate vicinity of a completed facility against the surrounding area at the same site, and separately compare 341 built campuses against 84 hyperscale projects that were publicly announced and never constructed. Satellite imagery does the dating: land clearing and night-time lights mark the moment construction begins.

At the parcel, the effect is enormous and unmistakable. Night-time lights rise by 38 per cent within the first kilometre when construction starts. Vegetation clears. The place is visibly transformed. And then, moving outward, the signal decays to approximately nothing by five kilometres. Announced projects that were never built show no comparable change, which is the control working exactly as intended.

Beyond the fence line, the findings are a sustained deflation. Advertised salaries do not rise; the authors can rule out any increase above 5.5 per cent. New firm registrations and business applications do not rise, with upper bounds of 1.6 and 5.7 per cent. Supplier job postings rise by 5.9 per cent, but the confidence interval runs from a 15 per cent decline to a 32 per cent increase, which is a polite way of saying the data cannot tell. County-level data-processing employment rises 26 per cent and establishments 27 per cent, but that category includes the facility itself, and related industries show no consistent response. Compute-using firms are indeed found near data centres, but 69 per cent of them were already there before the nearest facility opened. Nearby rents may rise a few per cent, imprecisely. Multifamily permitting does not rise. Net migration does not rise. Foot traffic and commercial spending show no robust change. Residential electricity prices, in their US sample, do not rise either.

The summary sentence is one that ought to be pinned above every county planning committee and every provincial development office on earth: at this scale, the sites are transformed, but there is little evidence of a new local cluster.

That is Guizhou's 7.4 per cent GDP growth and its second-from-bottom wage growth, derived independently, on the other side of the Pacific, from satellites and job adverts.

Two Kinds of Job, and the Gap Between Them

The employment arithmetic is not hidden. It is simply presented in a way that encourages people to add the wrong numbers together.

A hyperscale build is a construction event of genuine magnitude. Industry staffing analyses drawing on the Uptime Institute's 2024 Global Data Center Survey put a 100 megawatt campus at roughly 850 construction workers across an eighteen-month build. These are the industry's own numbers, published by recruiters who profit from the boom, which makes their shape more telling rather than less. That is real money moving through a local economy: rented rooms, diesel, lunch, aggregate, portaloos. It is also, by design, temporary. When the last commissioning engineer drives away, a fully built 100 megawatt hyperscale campus typically retains somewhere between one hundred and two hundred permanent on-site staff.

The gap between those two figures is where the political trouble lives. A community is shown the construction number, experiences the construction number, and then is left with the operations number, which is smaller by an order of magnitude and often filled by specialists who commute or relocate rather than by the people who used to work the mountain.

Guizhou has a particular reason to feel that gap keenly. For three decades the province's most reliable export was working-age adults, sent to the factory belts of Guangdong and Zhejiang, leaving behind the phenomenon that Chinese social policy calls left-behind children. Li Xixiu's observation that villagers can now find work nearby is, in that context, an enormous statement. It is also one that depends on which phase of the project you are standing in. Construction employment for a build-out of dozens of facilities can run for years, and while it runs, it looks like a structural change to the local labour market. It is not one.

Ireland offers the cleanest illustration in the world, because the Irish state publishes both sides. The Central Statistics Office found that data centres consumed 22 per cent of all metered electricity in the Republic in 2024, and 23 per cent in 2025. The Department of Enterprise's own assessment, which dates from 2018, put direct employment at roughly 1,800 people, with a further 1,900 a year in related construction, the latter figure supplied by the Construction Industry Federation. Slightly less than a quarter of a national grid, in exchange for a direct workforce that would fit comfortably into a mid-sized secondary school. The jobs number is eight years older than the electricity number, which tells its own story about what gets counted. The Commission for Regulation of Utilities has rewritten connection policy to favour applicants who bring their own dispatchable generation or storage and can offer demand flexibility. Ireland is not hostile to the industry. It simply ran out of grid before it ran out of enthusiasm.

Loudoun County, and Why Guizhou Cannot Copy It

There is one place where the bargain has unambiguously worked for residents, and it is worth understanding precisely why, because the reason does not travel.

Loudoun County, Virginia, hosts the densest concentration of data centres on the planet. Its fiscal 2027 budget anticipates roughly 417 million dollars in real property tax from data centre buildings and about 879 million dollars in personal property tax on the servers and equipment inside them, nearly 1.3 billion dollars in total, or 45 per cent of the county's nearly 2.9 billion dollars in tax revenue, from a county of about 440,000 people. Industry-adjacent analysis by Mangum Economics for the Northern Virginia Technology Council estimates that without that revenue, residential property tax rates would have to rise by 91 per cent, nearly double, costing a typical homeowner some 5,800 dollars a year. The average completed facility employs about 50 people.

Loudoun is not a story about labour spillovers. Bahar and Wright would predict, correctly, that the wage effects there are muted. Loudoun is a story about a fiscal linkage: a local government with the legal power to tax the equipment inside the building, annually, at high value, and to spend the proceeds on its own schools and roads.

Almost nowhere else has arranged things that way. In the United States, at least thirty-five states now offer tax incentives aimed specifically at data centres, with cumulative awards approaching twenty billion dollars by the authors' tally from the Good Jobs First subsidy tracker. Good Jobs First's own analysis of eleven data centre megadeals found an average public cost of about 1.95 million dollars per permanent job, with the largest single per-job subsidy, 6.4 million dollars, awarded by North Carolina to Apple. The organisation's recommendation was that all state and local subsidies combined be capped at 50,000 dollars per permanent job. Set against 1.95 million, that recommendation reads less like policy advice than like an intervention.

Guizhou's structural problem is that it has neither Loudoun's tax handle nor the option of declining the deal. Chinese local governments do not levy a meaningful recurring property tax. Their revenue historically came from land sales and from off-balance-sheet borrowing through local government financing vehicles, which build the roads and substations and repay the loans out of the growth the roads and substations are supposed to produce. When a province competes for a hyperscaler by discounting power, discounting land and building the grid connection itself, it has converted the fiscal linkage from an asset into a liability before the first rack is energised. The investment lands. The debt service lands. The wage bill, being tiny, lands somewhere between the two and barely registers.

An Enclave With Better Cooling

Development economists have a name for this shape, and it is much older than the cloud.

Albert Hirschman argued in 1958 that the developmental value of an industry lies not in its size but in its linkages: backward, to the suppliers it pulls into existence, and forward, to the industries that add value to its output. In a 1977 essay on staple exports he generalised the scheme, adding the fiscal linkage, meaning the public revenue an industry generates, and the consumption linkage, meaning the local demand created by the wages it pays. An enclave economy is what you get when all four are weak. The classic cases are extractive: a capital-intensive mine or oil field employing very few people relative to its contribution to output, importing its equipment, exporting its product, and touching the surrounding economy mainly through a fenced perimeter and a haul road. UNCTAD's work on extractive industries describes exactly this combination, capital-intensive, labour-light, linkage-poor, as the reason resource wealth so often fails to convert into local development.

A hyperscale data centre is an unusually pure specimen. Its backward linkages are global: the GPUs come from a handful of foundries, the transformers and chillers from specialist manufacturers, the network gear from a shortlist. Bahar and Wright's inconclusive supplier estimates are what you would expect from an industry that buys almost nothing locally except concrete, security and landscaping. Its forward linkages are, by construction, non-local: the entire premise of Eastern Data, Western Computing is that the value-added services consuming the compute stay two thousand kilometres east. Its consumption linkage is capped by a payroll of dozens. And its fiscal linkage is the one variable that policy can actually set, which is precisely why competition between jurisdictions tends to bid it towards zero.

This is not an argument that data centres are bad. It is an argument that they are a particular category of thing, and that the category has a well-documented behaviour which the promotional literature systematically ignores. Guizhou did not misunderstand data centres. It understood them as a growth engine, which they are, and hoped they would also be a development engine, which they largely are not.

The Racks That Nobody Rented

The second Guizhou problem is that a good deal of the capital did not even deliver the compute.

In March 2025, MIT Technology Review reported that of the more than five hundred data centre projects announced across China in 2023 and 2024, at least 150 had been completed by the end of 2024, and that local publications were reporting up to 80 per cent of new computing capacity sitting idle. GPU rental prices collapsed accordingly: an eight-GPU Nvidia H100 server that had commanded around 180,000 yuan a month fell to about 75,000.

The DSET researchers Angela Glowacki and Cartus Bo-Xiang You, writing for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's Strategist in May 2026, mapped the same problem onto the western build specifically. By 2024, 633 hyperscale and large data centres had been built and made operational under Eastern Data, Western Computing, lifting national computing capacity to 268 exaflops. Some western facilities, they wrote, sit empty, with utilisation rates as low as 20 to 30 per cent, a far cry from the original policy goal of more than 60 per cent. Beijing has since restated that all data centres should run at no less than 60 per cent utilisation, and that no new large or super-large facilities should be built in cities where existing ones operate below 50 per cent.

The reasons are mundane and instructive. Remote regions lacked the fibre-optic cables needed to move large volumes of data in real time, forcing operators to spend more on transmission than the model assumed. Renewable curtailment in the western region still exceeds 30 per cent, which undercuts the cheap-clean-power premise. Many facilities were built on the assumption that state-owned enterprises and government agencies would buy the compute, and that demand did not fully arrive. Inter-governmental competition produced speculative overbuilding, and more than a hundred state-backed projects have been scrapped in the past eighteen months against eleven cancellations in the whole of 2023.

Guian, to be fair, is at the better end of this distribution. Local reporting in August 2026 put first-half electricity consumption growth in the new area at 33.7 per cent year on year, on a total of 3.12 billion kilowatt-hours through late June, with big data operations alone consuming 1.93 billion of that, up 52.2 per cent. Guian is busy. But an idle rack and a busy rack impose the same debt service, and a province cannot know which it has bought until several years after it has paid.

Who Actually Pays the Bill

If the benefits are concentrated at the parcel and diffuse to nothing by five kilometres, the costs run in the opposite direction. They start at the parcel and travel.

A 2026 arXiv preprint by Danbo Chen, Zijun Zhou, Yongyang Cai, Jiahong Qin, Ani Katchova and Lei Chen models this directly, coupling language-model analysis of corporate compute plans with energy-system modelling. It projects that electricity consumption by the six largest AI firms will rise from roughly 118 terawatt hours in 2024 to between 239 and 295 terawatt hours by 2030, about one per cent of global power demand, with more than 90 per cent of new capacity landing in North America, Western Europe and Asia-Pacific. Crucially, the burden is not evenly distributed. The authors construct a Power Stress Index and find values above 0.25 in Oregon, Virginia and Ireland, while diversified grids in Texas and Japan absorb the load more comfortably. Their conclusion is that AI infrastructure has become a structural component of power-system dynamics rather than a marginal load, which means it now has to be planned for rather than merely connected.

Water follows the same logic. A preprint by Yuelin Han, Pengfei Li, Adam Wierman and Shaolei Ren, revised in March 2026, estimates that if 2024 water-use intensity persists, US data centres could collectively require between 697 and 1,451 million gallons per day by 2030, comparable to New York City's entire supply. Even assuming aggressive efficiency gains of 10 per cent a year, the range is 227 to 604 million gallons daily. Associated public water infrastructure costs reach roughly ten billion dollars, rising to fifty-eight billion under high-growth scenarios. Their central observation is the one that matters here: these impacts are highly concentrated on communities hosting data centres. The compute is national. The reservoir is not.

Memphis has become the American shorthand for what concentration looks like when it goes wrong. The NAACP, the Southern Environmental Law Center and Earthjustice sued xAI in April 2026 over the operation of 27 unpermitted methane gas turbines in Southaven, Mississippi, effectively a power plant assembled to feed the Colossus 2 facility. This is an airshed where Shelby County in Tennessee and DeSoto County in Mississippi have both received an F grade for ozone from the American Lung Association. The plaintiffs include residents of the Whitehaven and Boxtown neighbourhoods of South Memphis, downwind. The Department of Justice has since intervened on xAI's side. The turbine count, meanwhile, never stopped rising. The plaintiffs went back to court on 6 May 2026 seeking an emergency order to halt operations, and the installations continued regardless: by mid-July, correspondence between xAI's environmental consultant and Mississippi regulators, obtained by Reuters through a public records request, documented 59 unpermitted turbines, at least 57 of them at Southaven, roughly double the number the company had publicly acknowledged. The resolution took the most direct form available: Mississippi's Permit Board had already approved a permanent 1.2 gigawatt plant of 41 turbines on the same ground in March 2026, a month before the suit was filed, and on 31 July xAI agreed a schedule to strip the temporary machines out of the Stanton Road site, beginning in August 2026 and finishing by July 2027. The fight over unpermitted temporary turbines has been settled by making the power station permanent and lawful in the same airshed, breathed by the same people, which is the tell that it was never really about permits. Whatever the litigation concludes, the geography of the dispute is the point: the model is trained everywhere and the generation sits in one postcode, with permission now to stay there.

What Happens When You Ask

There is a final piece of the research picture, and it is a strange one, which is what makes it interesting.

In a preprint first posted in November 2025, Zhifeng Wu, Yuelin Han and Shaolei Ren asked whether large language models could stand in for community consultation on data centre projects. They built a framework that polls AI agents, prompted with local demographic and geographic context, on how they would respond to a proposed facility, and compared the output against real human survey data. The agents identified water usage and utility bills as the dominant concerns and tax revenue as the principal perceived benefit. Responses varied meaningfully depending on which model was used and where the hypothetical project sat. And, notably, the synthetic responses aligned substantially with findings from actual human surveys. The authors propose it as an efficient early-stage instrument for folding neighbourhood perspectives into siting decisions before the plans harden.

You can read that finding two ways, and both are uncomfortable. The optimistic reading is that we now have a cheap way to anticipate what a community will object to, months before the first hearing, at a stage when the design can still change. The bleak reading is that the industry has arrived at a technique for simulating consent, and that the reason such a technique is attractive is that the genuine article is expensive, slow and increasingly likely to say no.

The Guizhou villagers quoted by AFP were not polled, synthetically or otherwise. They were asked a question by a passing reporter and answered it honestly, which is a different exercise from being consulted before a decision. Nothing in the Eastern Data, Western Computing framework required anyone in Guian to be asked whether the mountain should become a campus, and it is worth being clear that this is not solely a feature of the Chinese system. Across the United States, the same decision is routinely taken under non-disclosure agreements and by-right zoning, and communities learn what has been approved after the approval.

Note also what the agents converged on. Water. Bills. Tax revenue. Not wages. Not careers. Not the long-run transformation of the local labour market. Even a synthetic public, prompted to reason about a data centre, does not appear to expect it to be a jobs programme. The expectation gap that Guizhou is living through is largely one that promoters created and that residents, given a moment to think, do not fully share.

What Shu Peihua Is Describing

So return to the shopkeeper on the road outside Huawei's clock tower, because nothing in the preceding sections makes what Shu Peihua said untrue.

The road is real. In a karst province where a mountain village might once have been two hours from a trunk route, a dual carriageway built to carry transformers and chilled water plant is a permanent improvement to the lives of everyone along it. The universities are real; a local vendor told AFP that two had been established since the facilities went in. The customers are real, and so is Li Xixiu's point that people find work nearby now instead of boarding a train to Guangdong. Guizhou has been one of the great exporters of migrant labour in modern China, with all the social cost that implies, and a family that stays together because a parent can get a security job or a canteen job or a fit-out job forty minutes from home has received something that does not show up in a wage-growth ranking.

What the evidence says is narrower and harder. It says that these gains are the consumption linkage of a construction boom plus the ordinary agglomeration of a new-town development, and that they are front-loaded. It says the operational phase which follows will not employ many people, will not raise local salaries measurably, will not spawn a cluster of firms that were not already coming, and will not, on the American evidence, move rents, migration or retail spending much either. It says the electricity, water and land are consumed locally while the value of what they produce is realised somewhere with better weather and higher salaries. And in Guizhou's case, it says the province financed the entry ticket with debt that now ranks second-worst in the country relative to revenue, against assets that may be running at 20 to 30 per cent utilisation.

None of that argues for refusing the data centre. It argues for pricing it honestly, and for noticing which linkage is doing the work. The fiscal one is the only channel a host can reliably control, and it is the one that inter-jurisdictional competition destroys first. There are policy shapes that hold onto it: recurring taxation of the equipment rather than one-off land revenue, as in Loudoun; subsidies capped per permanent job, as Good Jobs First proposes; published utilisation and load data so that a province can tell a productive asset from a monument; large-load tariffs that make the operator, not the household, pay for the substation; and sunset clauses that return the abatement when the promised employment does not materialise.

The alternative is what the resource curse literature has been documenting for sixty years in copper and oil, now rendered in reinforced concrete and immersion cooling. Something enormous arrives. The output figures move. The mountain gets a road, and then the road gets quiet, and the ledger that recorded the growth turns out never to have been the ledger that measured the prosperity.

Shu Peihua is right that it used to be a barren mountain. The question Guizhou has yet to answer, and that a hundred counties from Virginia to Kildare are asking in their own accents, is what a mountain becomes when the thing built on it needs the mountain far more than the mountain needs it.

References and Sources

1. China goes rural with data centres in quest to power AI – AFP, via The Star, 19 August 2026
2. Abundant electricity isn't enough: China's overbuilt AI computing power is underused – Angela Glowacki and Cartus Bo-Xiang You, The Strategist, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 6 May 2026
3. The Local Economic Impact of Data Centers – Dany Bahar and Greg C. Wright, working paper, 7 August 2026
4. Concentrated siting of AI data centers drives regional power-system stress under rising global compute demand – Danbo Chen, Zijun Zhou, Yongyang Cai, Jiahong Qin, Ani Katchova and Lei Chen, arXiv preprint 2604.06198
5. Small Bottle, Big Pipe: Quantifying and Addressing the Impact of Data Centers on Public Water Systems – Yuelin Han, Pengfei Li, Adam Wierman and Shaolei Ren, arXiv preprint 2603.02705
6. What AI Speaks for Your Community: Polling AI Agents for Public Opinion on Data Center Projects – Zhifeng Wu, Yuelin Han and Shaolei Ren, arXiv preprint 2511.22037
7. China built hundreds of AI data centers to catch the AI boom. Now many stand unused. – MIT Technology Review, 26 March 2025
8. Western regions to gain computing power – China Daily, 17 March 2022
9. Big data key to high-tech development – China Daily, 30 May 2023
10. China's debt-ridden Guizhou faces reckoning after years of splashing out on pricey projects – South China Morning Post
11. AI and Data Centers Surge in Guian as First-Half Electricity Demand Jumps 33 Percent – ChinaTechNews, 20 August 2026
12. Chinese government plans data center capacity reseller network amid overbuild concerns – Data Center Dynamics
13. Data Centres Metered Electricity Consumption 2025, Key Findings – Central Statistics Office, Ireland
14. Government Statement on the Role of Data Centres in Ireland's Enterprise Strategy – Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Ireland, June 2018
15. CRU Publishes its Decision on New Electricity Connection Policy for Data Centres – Commission for Regulation of Utilities, Ireland
16. Loudoun County, Virginia: The Heart of the Data-Center Boom – Judge Glock, City Journal, 26 April 2026
17. The Impact of Data Centers on Virginia's State and Local Economies, 6th Biennial Report – Mangum Economics for the Northern Virginia Technology Council, February 2026
18. Money Lost to the Cloud: How Data Centers Benefit from State and Local Government Subsidies – Good Jobs First
19. A Generalized Linkage Approach to Development, with Special Reference to Staples – Albert O. Hirschman, 1977, reprinted in The Essential Hirschman, Princeton University Press
20. Extractive Industries: Optimizing Value Retention in Host Countries – United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
21. Illegal Pollution from Data Center Power Plants Shouldn't Harm Our Communities. We're Suing xAI. – Earthjustice
22. Pollution from Musk's unpermitted xAI power project hits hardest in Black communities – Disha Raychaudhuri and Valerie Volcovici, Reuters, via The Star, 14 July 2026
23. State sets dates to retire temporary xAI turbines but allows some to go past original deadline – Mississippi Today, 31 July 2026
24. China's north cleans up its power mix as the south lags – Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, 19 March 2025
25. How Many Jobs Does a Data Center Create? – Data Center Geeks, compiling the Uptime Institute 2024 Global Data Center Survey

---

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

Shame on the publishers who didn't catch it. Is seeing the underlying foundation and patterning really that challenging? It was bad enough when very talented authors chose to make virtual copy-and-paste books, but this...this...

It sends me into a rage. An actual rage. Fucking hell!

How do people stomach reading this fancied up slop?! That is NOT how a thesaurus is used!

No wonder AI companies are buying up rare books and texts, scanning, then destroying them. It's not just to train. Give it a few generations and no one will have any understanding of the soul or artistry of the written word.

My writing is far from perfect, but it's not garnished AI bullshit.

A bestseller should not be this heavy-handed with its AI usage. That book is far from tool level usage. It has a smattering of human touch in it, but little more than that.

I am so sick of picking up “bestsellers” only to be presented with lazy AI butchery.

Hi blog friends! Hope this update finds you well. For your viewing pleasure – the word “Hi” fashioned out of some stepping stones in the dirt adjacent to some neighborhood businesses that always used to keep the prettiest roses out in front of their shops – which have become vacant since we last passed by 22 months ago.

It’s new power wheelchair adjustment time for me and the process has been bittersweet. It’s been kicking my arse, but I’m navigating through it. So far, my confidence has been shaken only twice – once due to a run in with a loose office rug inside an elevator, and again because of a small but very boss hill that slopes down in two directions at the same time. Crossing my fingers that the new center mount footplate I’m having installed soon will make a huge difference. In the meantime, I’ve learned that you shouldn’t be afraid to cite ADA violations to anyone, because chances are if they’re violating the ADA, they’re going against other important building and fire codes as well.

BTW, the loose rug in the elevator was Carpet Lady’s idea. Ever since she took over management duties here, she’s installed loose rugs inside the elevator and in front of just about every doorway and ruggable area in this place. We’ve had words about her doing this a few times. She also has a penchant for bringing in heavy planters filled with plants and “cute things” from Hobby Lobby. All these things are a wheelchair users nemesis, and they have been mine. Plus, it’s junking up our place and making it look unsightly as well.

Cute Snail coloring pages are still available for anyone who would like them. They’re easy print PDF and keepsake worthy if you’re into that sort of thing. According to my shop views, people who stop by are really liking the fall pages. Cute Snail Magical, Colorful, Bright, Spec-tacular Fall, Cute Snail Beautiful, Bright Spec-tacular Fall and Cute Snails On Rainbow Log Fresh Starts, Fall Leaves have the most views so far.

How are you doing? Let me know in the comments or via message, text or email. If it helps – which breakfast food takes the crown for you? Sweet Warm Cinnamon roll OR crunchy buttered toast? I like both. But buttered toast dipped in oatmeal or cinnamon rolls topped with butter are the shizzle!

Until next time!

❤️ Juliet

In Summary: * It's been my experience that a good, productive Monday can set the tone for the rest of the week. That being said, I feel good about the rest of this week, because today has been good and productive.

The regular Monday chore, my weekly laundry, was taken care of early. A substantial amount of prep work for my appointment tomorrow afternoon with the Retina Doc has been taken care of, too. What remains to be done in that regard is best done tomorrow morning.

Next I've got a baseball game to see me through the evening until bedtime. Yep, all things considered this has been a good Monday.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 227,63 lbs. * bp= 143/82 (71)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:20 – 1 banana, 1 little cupcake * 10:20 – 4 hot dogs in buns * 12:30 – pizza

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:15 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:55 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:15 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 07:30 – start the weekly laundry * 11:00 – follow news reports from various sources while folding laundry * 12:30 to 14:00 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 14:15 – listen to relaxing music while catching up on the day's prayers and sorting correspondence * 15:50 – listening to The Ride with JMV * 17:18 – switching over to 105.3 The Fan, DFW's #1 Sports Station, well ahead of tonight's MLB game between the Rangers and the White Sox.

Chess: * 17:00 – moved in all pending CC games

Ingredients

• 4 chicken drumsticks (thawed, refrigerated)
• 1-1½ C BBQ sauce

Directions

1. Put chicken in crock pot
2. Cover with sauce
3. Cook on high for 1 hour
4. Cook on low for 2 hours

Short-lived as their career was, The Civil Wars produced some of the best Americana storytelling of their era: emotional, but devoid of unnecessary soppy sentimentality. No filler, no skips, just songs that all pull their weight.

I remember while living in the U.S. spending a lot of time exploring Americana. That exploration led me to Jason Isbell, and the Drive-By Truckers, Old Crow Medicine Show, Shovels & Rope, and others. But it was The Civil Wars that struck a particular chord with me (pun intended). The quality song writing partnered with honest reflection wrapped in layers of sparsity that just work.

Barton Hollow is the kind of record that rewards a slow relisten — not because it's demanding, but because it's so sparse that everything you missed the first ten times finally has room to land. By the 11th listen that sparsity has layers and carries an emotional weight that wasn’t immediately obvious

20 Years

The first track on the album, and also the first one I remember hearing. One of the things that has always struck about The Civil Wars is how their voices aren't just complimentary, but weave together through melody and harmony.

If I recall correctly, this song is about a family secret related to one of them — but that's all that's ever been shared, and the mystery is cloaked in the misty Southern vibe. There's definitely a sense that the secret is never resolved, and the listener is left to ponder. But that pondering isn't necessarily a negative — if anything, it adds to the song's weight. It's that sense of mystery that first encouraged me to seek out more of their catalogue.

I've Got This Friend

Simple, but wonderfully executed. This is the track that proves the album's depth beyond the singles — no key change, no vocal fireworks, just a well-observed lyric and a melody and simple story that trusts the listener to feel it rather than being told to.It’s also immediately relatable. I think that’s the power of the Civil Wars, they tell a story through music, melody, and lyric but don’t feel the need to spoonfeed you into an emotional response. The bridge in particular is a beautiful meander of their complimentary vocals.

C'est La Mort

Could easily picture R.E.M. doing a rendition of this song and retroactively sticking it on Automatic for the People. It’s exactly the right register — hushed, mortality-haunted, elegant rather than bombastic, a song written from inside grief rather than looking back at it, letting the melody carry the weight instead of the lyric spelling it out. Sitting with it longer, I can also hear Eddie Vedder singing this — it has hints of “Just Breathe,” that same stripped-back, plainspoken intimacy with mortality, unafraid of the subject rather than skirting around it.

To Whom It May Concern

If Cinderella was set on a Southern plantation, this would be the song that played when Cinderella and the Prince are reunited. Even a “happy” moment on this record doesn't get a big sweeping orchestral triumph — it gets something quiet and aching instead, joy delivered in the same hushed register as the grief elsewhere on the album.

Poison & Wine

A song about two people who find themselves in a failed or failing relationship. Their most famous song, but I found it the least interesting track on the record — a little flat, sonically uninteresting, as close to skippable as this album has. Maybe that's the irony of it: the same sparseness I've praised everywhere else on Barton Hollow works against this one for me. Here it reads as flatness rather than restraint — proof that “less is more” isn't automatically successful just because it's the band's signature move.

My Father's Father

Has that small West Virginia mining town bluegrass vibe — a different corner of “Southern” entirely to the plantation-Gothic tracks elsewhere on the record, harder and dustier, generational hardship baked into the sound rather than genteel decay. The title itself does a lot of the work: an inheritance passed down through generations of men in a hard place. It's someone who wants to leave someplace but is trapped by that inheritance.

Barton Hollow

The record's mission statement, and arguably still their best song. Built on almost nothing — a driving guitar figure, some percussive stomping, two voices — and yet it's the most menacing thing they ever recorded, closer to a murder ballad than a folk song. As an opener it sets a tone the rest of the album never has to fully match again. It's also the song that announces who they are, in a way most bands need two or three albums to manage.

As a murder ballad, it's worth contrasting with something like Colter Wall's “Kate McCannon” — a classic murder ballad in the fullest sense, narrating the whole crime plainly: courtship, betrayal, confession, motive and method all laid bare from the killer's own mouth. “Barton Hollow” works almost in reverse. There's violence and consequence in the air, but the actual who-did-what-to-whom is never spelled out — atmosphere and implication rather than narrative. Wall gives you the whole crime scene; The Civil Wars just give you the guilt hanging over one. Fitting, given the same instinct runs through “20 Years” — withhold rather than confess, and let the listener carry the unresolved weight.

The Violet Hour

A beautiful instrumental piece. Starts off somewhat sombre, but gradually feels more hopeful, yet the cello keeps that hope grounded. And in true Civil Wars style, it ends feeling like the future has not yet been written. Has very TV theme tune vibes — Twin Peaks meets The X-Files.

Girl with the Red Balloon

Pure Leonard Cohen, with a touch of Serge Gainsbourg. The opening image — a pub on the south side of town, where time stands still while there's still wine around — does a whole backstory's worth of work in one line, the way Cohen so often let a room describe a character rather than naming a feeling. The Gainsbourg comparison lands in the mood: warm, a little dangerous, sung with an intimacy that undercuts how sad the actual situation is. It's a good reminder they weren't purely an Americana act — there's a genuine chanson tradition running under the surface too.

Falling

A swirling number. Where “Barton Hollow” is percussive and driving, “Falling” is disorientation set to music — a circular, almost hypnotic guitar figure and vocals that overlap rather than trade cleanly. The lyrics flow through the melody rather than sitting in tidy rhythmic boxes, stretching and compressing to match the emotional shape of the line — the same instinct you hear in Cohen or Joni Mitchell, where the tune sounds discovered rather than imposed. Even singing the “same” line, Williams and White sometimes land a syllable apart, which only adds to the vertigo.

Forget Me Not

Appalachia sweeps into Georgia's peach orchard and on to the porch of a Savannah plantation — a whole regional journey carried entirely in pacing and hush, without a single line of exposition. This is the album's Southern Gothic instinct at its purest: no magnolias, no sweet tea, nothing so on-the-nose. Just the sense of something old sitting on that porch, and a melody quiet enough to let it breathe.

Birds of a Feather

Another triumph of their vocals intertwining. The call-and-response to begin, before blending together. It's arguably the perfect metaphor for their pairing as artists — fitting, in hindsight.

Bonus Tracks

Billie Jean / I Want You Back

Their takes on these two are unique. Both flip their originals almost completely — Michael Jackson's “Billie Jean” is one of the most instantly recognizable grooves in pop music, all paranoid propulsion and dance-floor tension, but The Civil Wars strip that away entirely for a fingerpicked, swing-feel acoustic arrangement that turns a song about denial into something closer to a confession whispered across a table. “I Want You Back” is an even bigger swing — the original is pure euphoric Motown joy, so finding the yearning underneath the celebration is a much harder trick than slowing down a song that was already melancholy to begin with.

Dance Me to the End of Love

One of the rare moments where I enjoy a cover more than the original. Leonard Cohen's version is already iconic and kind of untouchable — dry, world-weary, with a sinister waltz undertow. The Civil Wars seem built for exactly this kind of material: restraint, close harmony, nowhere to hide. They're not trying to out-perform Cohen, they're finding the quieter, sadder song that was arguably always inside it.

You Are My Sunshine

This one immediately reminded me of my mother — she used to sing the chorus to us when we were young, to cheer us up when we were upset, and if it wasn’t this song it was Two Little Boys, which was a hit in its own right for the infamous Rolf Harris. It's a song that's been passed down so informally, parent to child, generation to generation, that most people who know it learned it the same way I did: sung to them, not from a record.

Fitting that The Civil Wars would be the ones to cover it too, given how much of their own catalogue plays with the contrast between a comforting surface and something more aching underneath.

Goodbye Girl

Not a cover, as it turns out — an original, despite the title's borrowed familiarity. Built around a small, precise image: someone forgetting their grandmother's scarf as they walk away in the park. Same songwriting DNA as the rest of the record — one specific, unremarkable object doing all the emotional work instead of a big declarative line about heartbreak.

The Theme Running Underneath It All

If there's a thread tying Barton Hollow together, it's this: love here is beautiful and hard — often a burden, something to be endured, sometimes naive, sometimes complicit, even compliant. The record rarely lets love be just one thing.

“Poison & Wine” is love as compulsion, damage and devotion inseparable. “Girl with the Red Balloon” is love as accommodation — someone permanently cast as the one who lets others in without ever quite being let in herself. Even “Barton Hollow” itself, on the surface a stomping outlaw song, carries that same undercurrent of consequence and reckoning running through nearly every love song on the record.

What keeps it from tipping into melodrama is that nobody in these songs is purely wronged. The narrator is usually implicated in their own undoing — staying too long, loving the wrong way, complicit in the same poison they're naming. That's love as something people participate in even while it costs them, which is a harder and more honest thing to write than straightforward heartbreak.

Mark Millar interviewing Traves Charest is so great.

Downloaded Ian M. Banks' USE OF WEAPONS on kindle for my travel reading, which I have embarrassingly yet to read. Even more embarrassing is that I haven't read any of The Culture novels, but they've been coming up enough in conversations for the past few years that it is high time.

Been a minute since I busted out the kindle, after having amassed a number of Arab-language paper books at the Cairo Book Fair earlier in the year. Last thing I read on the kindle was Walter Mosley's ARCHIBALD LAWLESS: ANARCHIST AT LARGE, which I really really loved.

#radar #reads

Ever been in a rough spot?

Last summer I was in a rough place. I had quit social media for a while. I had given up on some friends, and been given up on by my fair share too. I was cranky, not just because I am a bipolar with dysphoric manias, I was upset that “hanging out” seemed to be a thing of the past. I am a very extroverted type of personality, perhaps it hits me harder than most, granted. But it did hit me very hard. Even waiting in line sucks compared to the good ole’ days of talking to anyone.

I thought about selling all the music gear, I thought about a lot of things. But then my doctor diagnosed me with Tardive Dyskenisia after I experienced unpleasant shakiness and tension in my legs, toes, hands..jaw. That changed my thinking.

Yeah, but djembe?

Keri’s father passed away a long time ago and left us some wonderful musical instruments. We have a lovely 12-string from Yahama and a djembe from him. I grabbed the djembe for this first time around the time this was going on. I played drums in school, but I wouldn’t say I was ever good at them. But the hand drum patterns felt relieving, somehow. I felt the djembe drum limber me up for subsequent parts. It’s almost as if the rolling patterns and accents were busting away some kind of plaque on my arms and it made them feel better for other things.

When I play djembe daily, I am better at everything else I do musically. The least I could do was build a band with it. So if you are in a funk and happen to like djembe, you are in luck. Where the name comes from, basically. I wanted to make more funk music, initially, hopefully that part of the plan still works out.

Why no singer, singer?

Before this EP in Sept. last year, I hadn’t done much in jam rock or instrumental music. I tried some vocals on a few things, but it just didn’t feel right. In fact, I have tried to sing on a few Djembe Funk tracks, but it doesn’t feel right for that project. I am open to it, I love singing. But I haven’t found vocals I like for this in myself or anyone else who digs it. So, in keeping true to things I hold dear, no vocals yet. Keri sings a few words on a song, but Keri can do whatever she wants. lol.

Upon listening again…

I just listened to this again and it is a happy record. I might have made a few mixing decisions a little differently, if I mixed it again today. But this is an early work for this project. I’m very happy to present it a year later.

A goto celebration in the speakers.

If you don’t know, these songs, and all of Djembe Funk music is largely about celebrating. Not just happy, not just upbeat, but a celebration. I celebrate movement in my life now. I don’t need many reasons. I hope you’re not paying much attention to the music with folks shouting and throwing things up in the air. But if you happen to be, at least there’s nice djembe going.

We are looking at lot of improvisation.

I generally start each Djembe Funk jam with improvising on djembe, or electric guitar, or fretless bass. Once I have something I like and the BPM, I am off to the races. There’s a lot of the improvisation in each part that winds up on each track. Sometimes it rules, sometimes it doesn’t. I enjoy tracking and feeling free to improvise at the same time. If it vibes, I share it. Most times I don’t.

Citrus Fruit is a rad song, period.

One song made in this session is still one of my favorite songs! I feel like when I can squeak out one of my own favorite songs, I might as well have built my own house. “Citrus Fruit” has never left any playlists I have it on this whole time, by the way. I love when it comes on! I think that is a rad song, don’t mind saying. Had good shit that day, I guess. Must have.

Download (free):

Bandcamp: Djembe Funk Debut

Kintners Repository: Djembe Funk Debut

This is a short little thing, I don’t mind you keeping it handy for quick celebrations. It works for me.

Thanks.

Kelly Kintner

The Horse’s Mouth magazine

Gargantuan. Crypt's grit-and-gravel save displaced me. No longer an exhumed force, I am a source to levy the abstained in retaliatory scare— a fare most swoon as gamble, or grief-seeking preamble, but never quite the scandal that piqued their interest in the first debase.

Many race towards me. The privileged face what forged me. A lucky few are gored in forked-fee, but no —one— sinks to the depths of my spare.

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.