As I sat staring at the inbox for Amplify the Noise, the neurodivergent panic began to set in. Do all the things now versus can’t do all the things now. The familiar battle between wanting to tackle everything at once and being unable to decide where to begin. So I told myself to read the first email, and then the next. One thing at a time.
It felt rather appropriate that the first email was about the latest single from songwriter and poet Christian Wethered, “The First Thing”.
So I hit play, and from the moment the acoustic guitar began to strum, the double bass started to thump, and the drums settled into their steady beat, I felt my neurodivergence let out an almost audible sigh.
From his forthcoming album From The Balustrade (January 15, 2027), “The First Thing” offers two experiences that work beautifully together. The first is the music itself. Slow, steady, and soothing, it moves with the comfortable rhythm of something that has nowhere else it needs to be. The guitar, bass, and drums give each other room, creating a gentle sense of movement without asking one to keep up with anything.
The second is Christian’s voice and the words it carries.
Not quite sung and not quite spoken, his delivery has an eerily calm quality, as though he’s sharing something he has spent a long time trying to understand. There is a quiet certainty in the way he delivers the words, but the advice itself is far less certain than it initially appears.
The idea of keeping oneself at bay is an interesting one. At first, it sounds like a warning to hold back and to keep a safe distance from the world or even from one’s own feelings. Yet the song’s lyrical memories of intimacy, of kissing someone and losing control, suggest something more complicated. Perhaps keeping oneself at bay isn’t about refusing to experience life, but recognising how easily we can lose ourselves in the effort to understand or control it.
What makes that thought particularly interesting is how the music behaves around it. The rhythm remains steady while the words move between the memories, the observations, and the fragments of advice. The double bass gives the song a gentle physical pulse, while the acoustic guitar provides a familiar place for Christian’s to return to. There is nothing frantic about the arrangement, even when the lyrics acknowledge how quickly certainty can disappear.
And perhaps that is what I needed to hear when I opened that inbox.
“The First Thing” doesn’t offer a solution to the overwhelming business of being human and it doesn’t pretend that life can be organised into three simple instructions or that following the first will somehow make everything else fall into place. Instead, Christian Wethered allows the music to demonstrate something the words are still trying to work out.
Sometimes, the first thing isn’t to do anything at all. Sometimes, it’s simply to give yourself enough room to decide what comes next.
Artwork and Design by Electra Grant
