The Hour of Bewilderbeast by Badly Drawn Boy will always feel like home to me. Not because it reminds me of my hometown or a particular place, but because it carries a deeper sense of home: that feeling of belonging, safety, and ease that allows your whole body to relax.
It was the summer of 2000 when the album was released. I was 17 years old. When I think about being 17 now, I hold so many conflicting thoughts at once. It’s surreal to think of myself as that teenager now that so much has passed. And yet, inside, I still feel like the same person who first heard Badly Drawn Boy in a Chicago dorm room, staring at a tiny TV tuned to MTVu.
Badly Drawn Boy is the musical alias of Damon Gough, a knit-cap-wearing songwriter from northern England whose scruffy, offbeat style made him feel miles away from the polished pop of the time. The Hour of Bewilderbeast was his first full-length album, but unlike some debuts it arrived full-featured and expansive. Bewilderbeast is sprawling, playful, and emotional in a way that you rarely expect from a first album. It sounds like the work of someone who’d been quietly perfecting his craft for years and then, finally, opened the door.
The record is a collage, much like the art on its cover. There are songs, of course, but there are also moods, fragments, atmospheres, and recurring motifs. Themes don’t just show up and disappear; they stretch across multiple tracks, stitched together by beautiful instrumental breaks. Just like the album cover is a collage made to look like a Renaissance masterpiece, the musical fragments all come together to form something surprisingly unified, a masterpiece that was beautiful enough to win the Mercury Prize in 2000.
What’s kept it with me, though, isn’t the prize. It’s the way the album has somehow grown alongside my life. I keep finding new layers in it, and it keeps surfacing at strange, important moments.
A record that keeps coming back
When I hear these songs now, I’m not in that Chicago dorm room anymore. I’m suddenly in Tampa and St. Petersburg, driving to the beach with my wife.
There’s a very specific texture to those memories. A decade after I first heard Badly Drawn Boy, my wife and I were desperately trying to find something to ease her chronic pain from CRPS. That journey had brought us to Florida.
When you are on a ketamine IV for multiple days, there is not a lot of music that is bearable. The Hour of Bewilderbeast somehow worked. It was gentle and strange and familiar enough to hold onto.
The album really captures that magical spark between two people, not the Hollywood version, but the real thing you cling to when everything else is falling apart. By the time we finally found ourselves in Tampa, we had been going through so much that it felt almost like we were finding each other again after fighting too many battles.
We like to imagine love is as sturdy as a redwood tree, solid and growing, unflinching and constant. But it's more like the ocean — expanding and collapsing, lifting you somewhere timeless one moment and crushing the air from your chest the next.
The Hour of Bewilderbeast tells that story of love’s ebb and flow. It’s not just in the lyrics but in the structure of the album itself. Certain runs of songs feel like mini-films, self-contained emotional journeys. For me, two sequences stand out the most: the “water sequence” and the “summer love” sequence.
Learning to jump
Water almost becomes a character in the album through four songs, starting with “Fall in a River” and ending with “Another Pearl,” sometimes referred to as the “water sequence.” Together, they trace the arc from first hesitation to hard-earned resolve.
The plunge
“Fall in a River” has no chorus and very little traditional structure. It’s almost like a musical prologue, delivered to set the tone for the story. It doesn’t just start; it fades into being as if it was bouncing around in the ether. A playful ping-pongy stereo effect brings you into the story. Then once the lyrics start, we hear that he is hesitant to take that plunge. Maybe this is stupid? Maybe this is good? Maybe being stupid is a good thing?
That confusion and anxiety is familiar to anyone who has taken that next step where a relationship changes from just hanging out together to something more serious. Falling in love can feel like being swept away into a river whose destination you don’t know. The song ends with an abrupt splash. He’s in. Whatever this river is, it’s carrying him now.
Choosing love
In the next song, “Camping Next to Water,” we are presented with contemplation. He’s gotten closer to the water. Even though he is distracted, we begin to see his realization that this relationship is what he wants.
Love is a feeling, but it’s also a decision you keep having to make. A relationship doesn’t just land fully formed in your lap; it’s built across a thousand small actions. In this song, it feels like he recognizes that feelings are weightless without someone to share them with, and decides to actively engage, to move from passively falling into love to consciously choosing it.
The weight
From here, I almost visualize a montage of two lovers growing their relationship. For the first half of “Stone on the Water,” we hear no words, only the layers of strings. They conjure images of a couple: dancing in the park, baking bread, signing mortgage papers, arguing about nothing and everything, making up, trying over and over not to run out of fuel.
But before the singing begins, the strings carry a familiar tension.
Even when the love is strong, there can be that stone on the water that disrupts the current. Sometimes it’s something you did, sometimes something that happened to you, sometimes just the way you both responded. These stones don’t always move. They sit in the riverbed, permanently altering the flow.
Some pain never really heals. You learn to live around it. You decide whether you can trust that you won’t collide with it again, or whether you’re willing to endure it if you do.
Resolution
“Another Pearl” finally finds some kind of resolution. This song has more to say than the others in this run. His struggles feel more sorted, and his mind is focused on being together. There’s a subtle reversal here: after so much internal wrestling, he’s now asking his partner to meet him in his new certainty.
The focus is even apparent in the vocal arrangement with recognizable verses and almost a hint of a chorus.
This sequence of songs tracks the cycle so many relationships undergo again and again — the doubt, the leap, the building of a life, the stone in the flow, and then this decision: stay, repair, recommit…or walk away.
Magic, chaos, regret
The second sequence I think about is the “summer love” sequence, which starts with “Magic in the Air” and ends with “Pissing in the Wind.” If the “water sequence” is about learning to jump, this one is about what happens when you don’t — when you flinch, hesitate, and watch something slip away.
The flutter
The sequence starts with a simple piano and vocal, a beautiful ballad that paints images in your head. We’re filled again with that buzz of new love. Decades later, I can still remember that first flutter when I realized my wife was the person I wanted to spend my life with.
Magic in the Air is how you feel after you’ve just spent the day with your lover and you are alone afterwards, replaying everything. The excitement is still hot and fresh and you are intoxicated with love.
The tornado
“Cause a Rockslide” is almost like an entire musical in a single song. I absolutely love the thought that sweetness could cause a rockslide. The song starts with the sweet and innocent excitement of summer love, but then it turns.
The sound swirls with samples and loops whispering in your ears and shooting across the space. It’s like we are Dorothy in her Kansas house, being tossed around by a tornado and watching the mayhem outside. When we finally land, we are again met with strings and a half-sarcastic lament.
It’s almost as though summer’s love was lost, and the regret has settled in so deeply that Gough is beginning to question all of his choices. While he jokes that he is joking, these lyrics always stick with me: “Watching another day turn into night/There goes another month/Doesn't it frighten you so?”
Yes, Gough, it does frighten me. Just like when Animal Collective asked, “are you also frightened?”, yes, I am frightened! I want to live every moment that I can. I stay up late at night as if every day is a tiny death, a tiny loss of time.
The waste
Finally, in “Pissing in the Wind,” he really reckons with his lack of connection. It was all a waste of time. He had nothing to gain from all this anxiety, all this half-commitment. The worm was right there on the hook. He was right there at the water, but he had doubts and didn’t dive in as fully as he should have.
At this point he is so desperate he will take anything. You may have been at that moment: when you’ve lost it all and you know the outcome is not going to go your way, but maybe just a little something could help you keep going. You just need something to hang on to, something to prove that the love is still there. His voice aches with desperation to make a connection and to keep it flowing, to keep the love between them.
Interludes, TV, and taxis
“Blistered Heart,” much like “Bewilderbeast” before it, presents us with simple, gentle melodies that let us process the depth of the movements we’ve just witnessed. But this music doesn’t just fill space, it brings a story to life. In “Blistered Heart” we start with strings and their simplicity but are met by waves of trembling horns and ambient echoes. The story swells and builds and then deposits us on the shores.
And while we sit there pondering our musical sorbet, we’re thrust into the driving pop ballad “Disillusion.” It’s interesting that I’m writing this as MTV announces the cancellation of their 24-hour music channels, because I was introduced to Badly Drawn Boy through the video for “Disillusion” on MTVu in that Chicago dorm room. MTV actually had multiple 24 hour music channels that would play on our dorm room cable. It was amazing. But just like everything else, it couldn't last forever. I'm grateful I was able to enjoy it when I could.
In the video, Gough is portrayed as a personal taxi for people around New York City.
That video was the moment this music truly entered my life. The songs would leave and return again, just like the waves of the relationships they portray, over the 25+ years that have followed. The more I listen, the more I can’t stop thinking that this album is a perfect mix of storytelling and musical escape.
What we leave behind
The stereo effects on “This Song” leave it echoing in my brain for moments after it has passed. It almost feels like those binaural sounds created to produce euphoric effects. It’s short and beautiful and one of my favorite songs on the record.
The meta description of the song, how it will affect others even after his passing, always lingers in my mind as well. I often think about what legacy I’ll leave, not necessarily on the world, but with the people who actually knew me. How will we be remembered by those we love?
I hope that the words I write will someday give comfort to anyone who misses me once I am gone.
In a way, this entire blog might be my “This Song” to my family and friends — to you.
Why it still matters to me
When I zoom out, what makes The Hour of Bewilderbeast a “perfect album” for me isn’t that every track is flawless. It’s that the whole thing mirrors the shape of a life: the jump into love, the comfort, the chaos, the regret, the tiny jokes over enormous fears, the quiet attempts to leave something meaningful behind, and how it all comes together to make something beautiful in the chaos.
In the dorm rooms, it felt like I was entering a doorway into a world of more interesting music. Decades later it feels more like a companion. A record that knows what it is to be bewildered and keeps going anyway.
Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to it. And maybe that’s why I’m writing about it here, hoping that, for you, it might become home too.