I don't do dignity. I don't do cold objectivity. The minute I find myself second guessing any enthusiasm I might feel for a piece of music - wondering if it's dignified for an old bloke to gush with praise, or whether I'm going to look foolish if everyone else thinks the music is bum gravy - is the moment I give this lark up.
I'm all about over the top. I don't give a stuff what anyone else thinks. Heck, I'm still prepared to type "don't give a stuff" in 2013. Even Alan Partridge would have thought twice about that.
Most week's I sit in front of my speakers cursing, screaming, banging my fists on the table, allowing occasional demothropic tweets to leak out on Twitter, head in my hands wishing my ears were filled with hydrochloric acid instead of whatever half-assed nonsense is dribbling forth from the BBC Introducing Uploader.
Which - no doubt - sounds cruel and unkind. But I shan't apologise for that. I refer the good reader to paragraph one. Music is too magical an entity to torture or half bake. To my mind, subjecting me to bad music is equivalent to breaking into my house and relieving yourself all over my favourite cushion, scratching my most cherished records, drawing schoolboy (not "schoolboy's") organs over my family photos in permanent marker.
A couple of weeks ago, someone whose music I'd critiqued after they'd sullied an already tiresome Thursday afternoon with - if memory serves me correctly - a Dictaphone recording that sounded like Red Hot Chili Peppers trying to play Arctic Monkeys cover versions in a swimming pool filled with out of tune, lumpy slurry - had responded by saying:
"I was hoping it wasn't you who'd listen to it."
Why?
"Because you pull it apart and tell us what you don't like about it."
The BBC Introducing Uploader isn't a direct line to the airwaves. In the middle of that pipe is - at least one - grumpy music-loving git, who wants to treat licence fee payers with music that will delight and inspire them. Not heinously deformed vegetables that wouldn't make it into the horse that got minced to pretend it was the beef.
Mostly, the bald patches on my head and the clumps of hair in my hands are the result of frustration. I want every track to be great. I want musical effulgence at every turn to lighten the maze of twisty little passages, all the same. I want to be positive. I want to fill every millisecond of my three hour radio show with music I can bawl about from Wales' rooftops.
And I'd quite like to be able to do that quickly every week. That way, I may get to spend an hour with my daughter on a weekend, rather than typing out emails to people who claim to want my opinion of their music until that opinion doesn't tally with their own delusions.
It's all worth it, though, for those moments when something special arrives from someone you've never heard of.
Elly Sinnett's song drifts in an on an arpeggio of almost-tuned guitar. Just at that moment when I was about to deck the V's at the track, demanding - crimson-faced - why Elly couldn't have just spent an extra 10 seconds tuning her B string - she started singing.
The thing about singing voices is that you can just tell, immediately, whether someone is any good or not. It's not about technique or precision. It's about believability. I only had to hear one phrase of Elly singing to know that I could trust the rest of the song with my life. She's not here faking me, or trying to commit an X Factor audition to GarageBand. Elly sounds like she'd be singing this song, in exactly the same way, regardless of whether anyone was interested in her music or not. And that makes her music all the more fascinating. It gives it a truth and beauty that no amount of vocal exercises can make up for.
This song isn't perfect - but what of any value in life is, or has aspirations to be?
It's a simple paean to love. It's a song that has been written a billion times before but it has an unaffected poetry - "constellation smile", "aching to kiss every inch of you" - that gives it more emotive clout than 95% of other people's fumblings. And somehow it's redolent of real love, not the hyperbolised version. I can imagine the morning hair, bad breath and bed farts: how all of those human things - like the slightly out of tune guitar - make this so much better.
When Elly goes falsetto for that tiny shard of a chorus, it makes me believe that love isn't some hokey construct dreamt up by Hollywood to sell us formulaic rom coms.
Elly is 18. She is from Pembrokeshire. Her songs are from somewhere much closer to all of our homes.
