Years ago, (no more than six according to what I’ve been able to find, despite it feeling like much longer ago), I heard this strange song about a person on a plane watching someone beside them write an email while they waited for the plane to fill up and taxi away from the gate. It was interesting, since it was fairly long for such a light song and it felt like such an incredibly human experience to immortalize in song. It somehow walked the line between fantastical and entirely real in a way that left me wondering if the performer was drawing on a lived experience or if they’d made the whole thing up. I didn’t really keep track of the song and it faded from my consciousness until a couple years later when I found a video circulating around Imgur that was someone’s senior project, an animated music video of a cover of the song that changed the gender of some of the characters in the story. It was a lovely video and it reminded me of the song I’d first heard a couple years prior. This time I looked up the artist for the original song and learned that the song, Dear McCracken by Bug Hunter, was just one part of a larger collection of music, available via YouTube videos and various music platforms. I am pretty sure I made a note to myself to listen to more of his music, but this was the summer I separated from my family and I lost track of a lot of things that summer, this artist included.

Jump four years into the future. It is the summer of 2023 and I’m slowly working through the extensive backlogs of the various animators, podcasts, and other creators I’ve supported over the years. In late August, I finally free up some time (since I’d largely given up on ever watching all of Drawfee’s backlog and allowed myself to invest in other video sources) and start digging into the patreon and social media accounts of DeepBlueInk, the animator who brought Drawfee to my attention, just in time to see him share a link to the impending release of a music video he animated for a musician whose name seemed familiar in a way I couldn’t place. Since I love an animated music video, I clicked the video to get it in my watch history and paused it before it could play since I was on my phone and didn’t want to listen to it publicly. That would have been rude. So the video lurked in my watch history for a few days until I finally remembered it. Which turned out to be perfect because it was a scheduled premiere and I’d clicked the video three days before it was scheduled to air and remembered it an hour after it premiered. It was an absolute delight, with gorgeous, delightfully detailed animation that kept me coming back to the song over and over again through the rest of the day. After a couple plays, I clicked through to the channel that posted the video to see if DeepBlueInk had done any other music videos and passed an enjoyable afternoon of work breaks watching videos for catchy tunes.

Only the following week, as I listened to my favorite tracks again, did the name finally trickle through the warped time of the past three years to connect the dots to the musician I’d looked up back in 2019. Sure enough, as I scrolled past the animated music videos to the filmed ones and lyric videos, did I see the video for Dear McCracken that I’d first watched all those years ago, during what would have been my first year at my current job. It was an eerie feeling, to find my way back to this musician for the third time in six years, entirely organically each time, but I wasn’t upset about it. I really enjoy the style of music that Bug Hunter puts out, so I had a good time digging into his larger discography. As I did that, moving from YouTube to my current main source for music, Tidal, I saw that the music video he’d put out (for his lovely song I’m terrified to share with any of my friends, Platonic Best Friend) was part of an announcement for the impending release of a new album called Happiness (Without a Catch) that was due out sometime in September. Since there was no specific date attached to the announcement and I was still buried in Baldur’s Gate 3, I put it out of my mind and figured I’d just keep an eye on Bug Hunter’s YouTube channel since I kept going back there to listen to his music anyway.

As it turns out, the album released on the day I was driving to my grandmother’s funeral (and must have been announced in the days just prior to it, since I missed it entirely), so I was not able to listen to the premiere live as I would have liked, but once I sort of checked back into life after a weekend of focused escapism, I remembered the album had released, listened to the YouTube video of the live broadcast, and then added the whole thing (album and each individual track) to my favorites on Tidal. It’s full of absolutely amazing tracks and I’ve been listening to it on repeat ever since, but I’m pretty sure my favorite track is Not Like That, the track that gives the album its title. The whole thing is fun and bouncy, showing Bug Hunter’s penchant for witty lyrics, clever plays on words, and enough depth to the songs that there’s more to catch on repeat listens.

This album, especially, leans into the that idea as the penultimate song on the album, Fan Fiction, casts the entire album in an entirely new light. I relistened to the whole album over again, with just as much focus and attention as my first listen, to consider the whole album in light of the premise that song establishes. It is the only “downbeat” song on the whole album, but not entirely consistently. The beat picks up and slows down as Bug Hunter sings through it, tying the rhythm to the theme of the album that has only just been revealed in a twist that I genuinely did not anticipate. Even though this song cast the rest of the album in a different light, turning the bright cheer of the first nine tracks into something a little sadder, a little more contemplative, it still holds on to the positive, cheerful view of life that those earlier songs established. As the album concludes with the mid-tempo One-Armed Hug, we get a little bit of commentary on the album as a whole, providing what seems like a little insight into the true nature of things that the perhaps overly cheerful first nine tracks and somewhat sad tenth track seem to brush over in favor of the emotional extremes called out in Fan Fiction.

I tend to enjoy music pretty passively, since I know that my own tastes aren’t really that popular these days, but I’d genuinely recommend Bug Hunter to anyone looking for a fun, upbeat musician to enjoy. I haven’t listened super attentively to his entire discography at this point, but I can say that Happiness (Without A Catch) is an absolutely stellar album with zero duds on it. Given this rate of success, and how I’ve enjoyed every one of Bug Hunter’s songs that I’ve listened to, I’m excited to go back through his older stuff once the shine starts to wear off his latest album and hopefully add a lot of new favorite tracks to my various playlists on Tidal. They’ve been in need of an infusion of a fresh sound and Bug Hunter is exactly what I needed.