About Side A

It started with Mama's Mixtape

A playlist I'd made of songs from across my lifetime.  Nothing particularly profound - just music I love and wanted to keep together. But when listening to it in the car with my kids, a song would come on and suddently I'd remember a time, a place, an event or even a phase (and boy was there a few of those!) and out would come a story. That's the wonderful thing about music. 

Without always realising it, we each have a soundtrack to our lives.  Songs become intertwined with our memories - and this is where the idea for Side A began.

Candle fragrances are often described by the memory they are supposed to evoke; a summer holiday, a cosy evening, a walk through the woods. But memories are far more personal and deeply rooted than that.  What associates a memory for one person to a scent, may be completely different for someone else.  No-one can tell you what a scent will make you remember, so Side A doesn't try to. 

Instead, we lead with music.  Each candle is a Track from a Volume, inspired by a song and paired with a fragrance to accompany it.

Play the song. Burn the candle

Scan the QR code on the candle tin and you'll be taken to it's track page where, if you haven't already guessed, we reveal the song behind the scent, it's inspiration and a link to Side A's own playlist on Spotify. 

The 80s and 90s are at the heart of Side A because they're the years I grew up in and, in my opinion, two of the best decades for music.  They were also the era of the mixtape - blank cassettes, handwritten tracks lists and songs painstakingly recorded from the radio, usually hoping the DJ wouldn't talk over the end! So the mixtape felt like the perfect fit.  Each collection becomes a Volume, made of six Tracks - a little nod to the way we used to collect the songs we loved way before the playlists, streaming and algorithms did it for us.  

Now all thats left is to press play and see where the music takes you.

Listen to Volume 1 on Spotify