Minute Taker’s Song for Ukraine

To be honest, any sentence that features the words “single” and “charity” usually makes us want to run for the hills.

Years of cringeworthy tracks released with the defence “but it’s for a good cause” have left us at the wrong end of the cynical spectrum.

Fortunately, I Don’t Understand by Minute Taker is a thoughtful, haunting synthpop meditation on the heartbreaking Russian invasion of Ukraine – and indeed man’s inhumanity to man. 

“I sit here helpless, eyes on screens

While hordes of broken families

Caught up in some ego war

Wonder if they’ll see the dawn”

The crux of I Don’t Understand is the struggle to understand what possible motivation belies such aggressive and violent behaviour.

Ben McGarvey, aka Minute Taker, told The Recs: “It really sums up my feelings about this war specially but also war in general… the needlessness of it. It questions how human beings can be so cruel, acting with so little compassion towards others.  It really baffles me.  I’ll never understand and really I don’t want to understand because perhaps that would mean I was capable of acting with that kind of heartless brutality”.