The Caretaker is a long-running project by English electronic musician James Leyland Kirby. His work under the Caretaker moniker has been characterized as exploring memory and the gradual deterioration of it, nostalgia, and melancholia. Initially the project was inspired by the haunted ballroom scene in the 1980 film The Shining, with his first several releases consisting of treated and manipulated samples of '30s ballroom pop recordings