In the hills between the New South Wales coast towns of Byron Bay and Mullumbimby, guitarist and singer Jesse Younan is busy recording the album that will change his life. Called A Good Day for a Migraine it features songs of longing and addiction, of estrangement, suffering and redemption, about the faults and frailties of being human. It’s released in April 2008 and the music press file rave reviews, calling it an album “we can’t afford to let slip by”. But when they phone for an interview, the publicist has some unusual instructions: they’ll need to call the leukaemia ward at Gold Coast Hospital.
Because of his condition Jesse can’t tour his album. Instead he launches it over the radio, giving long interviews from his hospital bed. He is charming and very funny despite what his songs and his image might suggest. The ward nurses, like most people who meet Jesse or hear his music, adore him...even when they catch him smoking in the fire escape. They play his new CD on loop and beg him to perform, but Jesse soon becomes so weak he can’t even hold his guitar. In June he’s moved to another hospital in Sydney’s west, near Parramatta where he was born, and dies there on the 22nd of July, aged just thirty-five.
TAKE SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL is a story about turning loss into something that endures. It's about true love, which is imperfect and which falters. It’s about music as a refuge, as much for the maker as for the listener. Most of all it’s a story about how being alone in the world is ultimately what binds us all together. Like the album he died making, the story of Jesse Younan’s life and music is something we can’t afford to let slip by.