June 2025
A new The Kev song, guitar covers and an essay about music
On June 25th, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned that talk of World War 3 was becoming commonplace, and that his country was straining to avoid a nuclear catastrophe. In light of all the bleakness, I filled my month with things that make life worth living – writing, music, and comedy.
Output
The Kevin McGeary Guitar YouTube channel is going strong. This month’s uploads included a cover of ‘Born to Run’ by Bruce Springsteen with my own guitar solo, and ‘Dancing Queen’ by Abba.
I also finished new The Kev song, ‘Millicent’, about a nauseatingly cutesy couple. My instructions to the rhythm section were to make it similar to ‘Standing Outside the Fire’ by Garth Brooks:
Activities
This month I worked hard in an office job and plodded through multiple open mics. With the latter I did not quite get the luck of the draw with attentive audiences who looked like they would dig my more extreme material, so I performed in safety mode.
I also finished an essay titled ‘Music We Cannot Hope to Emulate’, which took me several weeks. It is about some of the greatest orchestral music ever written, and I hope you read it.
As with most months, I appeared on Hannah’s Bookshelf on Radio North Manchester to talk about Emily Dickinson and Rolf Dobelli’s self-help book ‘The Art of Thinking Clearly’. My contribution can be found here at 1:33:50
I also gave a two-hour interview to ALL Fm about creativity, music, comedy and much more:
Wider World
The United States bombed three Iranian nuclear sites on June 21st. At a NATO summit four days later, President Trump compared the action to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, which ended World War 2, heralding in a period known to historians as Pax Americana, which the rich world has been enjoying for some eight decades.
President Harry Truman, who made the decision to drop the atomic bombs, was the first U.S president to have been a World War 1 veteran. For the rest of his life, he claimed to have a clear conscience about the bombings. This may be because the alternative was sending American ground troops into Japan, and he was acutely aware of what he would have been putting those men through.
At this week’s NATO summit, members agreed to increase defence spending to 5 percent of GDP. None of today’s world leaders is old enough to have fought in a world war. And this reminds me of an excellent 2023 article in The Critic by James Harris, about how the more the devastation of the twentieth century passes beyond living memory, the more likely we are to forget the lessons, and repeat the mistakes that made it possible.