A Head Full of Wishes is a site for Galaxie 500, Luna, Damon & Naomi, Dean & Britta and Dean Wareham. With news, articles and lists of releases and past and future shows.
Substack
A Head Full of Wishes newsletter #75
Well… that was a longer break than anticipated. I’ll fill in the gaps on the house move, and the almmost two weeks since that, at the end of this short newsletter just in case anyone’s that interested!
Although… this newsletter is going to be pretty light on actual AHFoW news since there hasn’t been too much happening since Luna’s tour ended. Here’s as much as I can muster…
- Naomi launched a fundraising campaign for her next film Superfund: The Unseen Landscape which sounds a fascinating subject, Her previous film Never Be a Punching Bag for Nobody was a beautiful looking film, and had a solo Naomi sound track so was also a beautiful sounding film. I expect the next film will tick similar boxes.
- Luna have one more date before the end of the year, at Elsewhere in Brooklyn on the 8th December. No news as yet on what Dean will be doing on New Year’s Eve. maybe nothing, although that very rarely happens!
- Damon has revisited his 2012 Pitchfork article, Making Cents, on his Substack - “Lots has changed, but […] the basic unfairness of this system has not”
My record collection, a post mortem
This is the 400th, and last, post in my record collection series; as well as the 392 numbered posts, there was an introduction post, there were “progress reports” every fifty posts, and, after the first 100 posts, a “quiz”. My intention was to do a quiz every 100 posts but there were so few entries to the first one I decided it wasn’t worth the effort.
This post is to wrap it all up in a bunch of numbers and idle ramblings.
I don’t think I fully appreciated the scale of this project when I started it in January 2023, and I didn’t really have any idea if I could find something worth saying about all of these records or indeed what I was aiming to achieve. I didn’t want to “review” anything; my opinion on pretty much everything in the collection has always been pretty clear, and who really wants an opinion anyway? Perhaps if there had been somewhere to discuss each release, maybe like a mailing list, we could have aired our opinions there.
I started with a spreadsheet containing a list of things in my collection, and a bunch of uncertainty. It seemed the first entry would define how the rest of the series would go, and fortunately it was one that I could write about. I knew where and when I bought it, how much I paid for it, and I even had a few newspaper clippings about it. So that’s what the series became. Not every entry was so fortunate, but post #1 did set the template.
The original plan was to cherry-pick items rather than include everything, but I found it hard to decide what to leave out, so quite early on, I decided not to leave anything out. That was the point at which the project went from something that would run for a few months to something that ran for over three years.
Statistics
Volume
- Total posts: 399 (including non-collection posts like progress reports, quizzes, special posts)
- Main series posts: 392 (numbered collection entries)
- Total words written: 154,026 (that’s more than A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens)
- Average post length: 386 words
- Median post length: 344 words
- Longest post: 1,872 words [300] Galaxie 500 - Galaxie 500 (aka Box Set)
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Shortest post: 46 words [149] Dean Wareham - answerphone message (1997)
- First post: 20th January 2023
- Last post: 1st October 2026
Time & Cadence
- Total time span: 1,352 days (3 years, 255 days)
- Yearly breakdown:
- 2023: 106 posts, 33,287 words (314 avg words/post)
- 2024: 110 posts, 41,667 words (379 avg words/post +21%)
- 2025: 105 posts, 43,972 words (419 avg words/post +36%)
- 2026: 78 posts, 35,100 words (450 avg words/post +43%)
Galaxie 500
- Posts: 64 (16.0% of all posts)
- Total words: 24,974 (16.2% of all content)
- Average post length: 390 words (highest average of the four)
- Albums/editions covered: 37 different releases
Luna
- Posts: 90 (22.6% of all posts)
- Total words: 33,100 (21.5% of all content)
- Average post length: 368 words
- Albums/editions covered: 56 different releases
Damon & Naomi (not including Magic Hour)
- Posts: 41 (10.3% of all posts)
- Total words: 14,636 (9.5% of all content)
- Average post length: 357 words
- Albums covered: 30 different releases
Dean & Britta
- Posts: 38 (9.5% of all posts)
- Total words: 12,255 (8.0% of all content)
- Average post length: 323 words (most concise of the four)
By Format Type
CD ████████████████████ 167 (43.3%)
LP ██████████ 86 (22.3%)
7" single █████████ 72 (18.6%)
Cassette ███ 20 (5.2%)
DVD ██ 14 (3.6%)
12" single ██ 11 (2.8%)
VHS █ 6 (1.5%)
Other █ 10 (2.6%)
Other stats
- Posts that have mentioned Motorhead: 7
- Posts that mentioned the Galaxie 500 Mailing List: 52
- Times I used the word ‘lovely’: 203 (gorgeous: 24, splendid: 8)
Things I have repeatedly moaned about over the course of this series
- How the Internet was more social before “social media”
- How much I miss the Galaxie 500 Mailing List
- How international postage costs have gone through the roof in recent years (and used it as an excuse for my occasional mean-ness)
- How vinyl prices have gone through the roof in recent years (and used it as an excuse for my occasional mean-ness)
- The lack of discussion/feedback
OK… you can probably stop there becasue the rest is completely unrelated to anything AHFoW.
On Monday 12th October we finally moved from Whitley Bay to Tweedmouth, it was not all that smooth. As well as the late exchange of contracts, the removals team took too lomg to back all our stuff into two vans which meant we didn’t arrive at the new house until late afternoon and arrived to the news that one of the vans had been in an accident and wouldn’t be arriving at all that day. Fortunately the van that did arrive had a bed… it didn’t have anything to sit on, and no bedding so we headed off to Argos for a duvet and some pillows we didn’t need! The rest of our stuff arrived late the following day, most of the contents had survived the crash, apart from half a doxen picture frames.
Hazel was away for the weekend so I spent it alone trying to get the house into some sort of order.
I took a break mid afternoon and cycled over the river for an outdoor concert celebrating the 200th anniversary of the town’s lighthouse - it was rather lovely.
I can’t promise that next week’s newsletter will be any more substantial than this one but… I’ll do my best. Feel free to get in touch if you have any ideas for the AHFoW Substack and if you feel the urge to contribute I’m alwasy happy to have guest posts!