Back in 2004, I bought this album after hearing the song “Saturated” on radio and being stuck in a Christian music phase where I somehow fell for music that had no real guts to it. Actually, that is unfair – “Saturated” is a pretty solid pop-rock song, a little distorted guitar, a bit of four-on-the-floor and some nice harmonising. It isn’t awful.

In early 2011, I met my future wife, and she related a story: she had attended a songwriting workshop a year or so earlier, an as part of the workshop they talked about an Opshop song – it may have been “No Ordinary Thing” from this album, or “One Day”, OpShop’s megahit from a couple years later. Either way, Rhi criticised the song, not realising that lead singer/songwriter Jason Kerrison was also part of the workshop; she didn’t know who he was until a friend pointed him out. Turned out she’d been sitting next to him.

In late 2019, one of my best friends got married, and my friend Dave and I discovered that the wedding photographer was the girlfriend of Jason Kerrison who, by this time, had established himself as a grade-a weirdo, having professed a belief that aliens are among us, and building a doomsday bunker in some undisclosed location. She said the media makes him out to be a weirdo, but he is actually just concerned about protecting his family.

In early 2022, Jason Kerrison showed up to play to the anti-mandate protesters in Wellington and I made a joke about the government using him to make conditions unbearable. He was the first mainstream celebrity to line up with them; in fact, you could argue that Winston Peters wasn’t brave enough to go down there until Kerrison had done so first.

New Zealand is a weird, small country sometimes.

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CLTM (Chris Listens To Music) is my attempt to listen to a new album every day; you can follow my efforts on Instagram here (and send recommendations), and if you like what I’m doing, support my efforts by shouting me a cuppa at Buy Me A Coffee.