Ten minute tea with Afternoon Tea. Spend ten minutes with Afternoon Tea. In the time it takes to boil one kettle, and let one cup of tea steep, we will have your daily art + music fix covered. Take your afternoon break with our Afternoon Tea curators. Need an extra lump of sugar? One more sip? If you have five minutes more (or ten), we have one more hit.
Today’s tea + soundtrack + visuals curated by Polaris Long-Listed Songwriter Neil Haverty.
Toronto songwriter and composer Neil Haverty (frontman of alt-folk ensemble Bruce Peninsula, and composer of the Wildhood soundtrack) is back with “Some Days,” a soulful and synth-driven single that dives into the quiet pressures of daily life – the aspirations we wake up to, and the grace we need to let go when things don’t go to plan.
Hitting the sweet spot between indie soul, alt-R&B, and synth-pop, “Some Days” brims with cloud-busting strings from Mika Posen (Agnes Obel, Timber Timbre), broken arpeggiated synths, and “drunk” drums – all filtered through Haverty‘s distinctive lens. Produced and mixed with Leon Taheny (Owen Pallett, Fucked Up), the track blends analog and digital textures, pairing brash yet soulful vocals with a groove that’s both unbothered and motivated.
“I wanted to acknowledge the patterns and discrepancies in how a person can approach each day,” Haverty explains. “Some days are just off. Other days are full of promise and brimming with energy. I’m always interested in the spectrum of variables underneath a topic, and mood is an especially broad playing field for that.”
Stream + share “Some Days” now:
Lyrically, “Some Days” sits in the space between self-discipline and self-trust, wondering whether today is one of those “rise to the challenge” days or a “stay in bed” one. “I sometimes like to remind myself that society doesn’t expect anything from me by default, except maybe that I get dressed before I leave my house,” Haverty elaborates. “When you reset the expectations of your day to just putting your clothes on, everything else you do from there is a bonus.”
Best known as the frontman of genre-bending choral collective Bruce Peninsula (5M+ streams, Polaris long-list), Haverty also works as a screen composer, recently earning a 2025 Canadian Screen Award nomination for his score to the doc series Who Owns The World. “Some Days” marks his third single of 2025, with a fourth on the way in October.
I’ll admit that coffee is my usual choice, but the act of deliberately sitting to consume art with a hot drink is something I think is important for the soul. I picked a couple meditative pieces to share with you, because I view this activity as integral for clearing my mind. Music For 18 Musicians is a piece of music I’ve returned to over and over again, and I think now I really do use it as a realignment of my thoughts. The further you get into the piece, the more you will untangle. It’s what forward momentum sounds like to me, and some days I try to get in this headspace first thing because it puts me on a fruitful and optimistic track. It’s a long, repetitive listen on the surface, but if you accept the challenge of staying with it and noticing the subtle shifts throughout, it’s incredibly rewarding. We’ve become really comfortable with echo and delay in a synthetic context, but considering there are 36 hands involved here and it is so steady and unwavering and blissful, it strikes a deep chord in me.
I love Norman McLaren for some of the same reasons and thought his animation techniques in Pas De Deux echo Reich’s approach somewhat. McLaren’s films work well with all kinds of music (shoutout to Absolutely Free who have been re-scoring them live lately) but I’d urge you to watch this twice, so you can hear the original sound too. He spent his life manipulating film to make dense, dancing visual tapestries and sometimes you can hear those manipulations too. Some call him the “first electronic musician”. Either way, he understood that film and music are in love, and that we are all enriched by their union.
This is just the tip of the iceberg for both of these artists, so if you were otherwise unaware, I envy you because I’d love the chance to experience their catalogues for the first time.
I posed these choices to my tea-obsessed partner and she had this to share:
“Harney and Sons Paris loose leaf tea. Steep for four minutes and add a splash of milk before sipping. Best when paired with a Tim Tam, dunked in the tea. (obviously.)”
Sounds perfect.
Thanks! Nice sharing a tea with you.
Tea + Me 