This is the third of my ongoing series of blog posts on the Making Of my new album as Granfalloon, Calendar - Chapter 2. To start at the very beginning and read my Making Of series for Volume 1, go here.
TRACK 3: TRAVELLING SONG
SUBJECT: It’s a song about… well... travelling
OPENING RAMBLE
When I approached Lobelia about working on this album with me I had three categories of songs earmarked for what would become Calendar - Chapter II:
i. Songs that I felt were almost there but needed a little more work to feel satisfyingly effective.
ii. Songs where I wanted to use the title or lyrical snatches for something completely new.
iii. Songs where I wanted to use the subject matter or theme for something completely new.
This is one of the latter songs.
WRITING IN 2014
The original 2014 draft of this idea was written in the classically short turnaround of a day for my weekly deadline but had the added deadline of my having been invited on BBC Introducing that week. They’d heard about my 52 Project by then and wanted me to showcase what I’d been working on. The subject matter had been set by Jess* that week and I set to work on it. Let’s see what I wrote about it in February of 2014:
“Well another week, another song.
The poet Tom Kwei said a couple of weeks ago that I was a tenth of the way towards my goal of writing a new song every week of 2014. That sounded easy!
Charlie Craven of BBC Introducing rang me the week I announced this project to ask if I'd come in and play the song I'd written that week on the show. During the interview he said that 7 songs were written, that's 45 left to write. That sounded a lot trickier!
This week's topic was not mine, the choice was made by my mystery songwriter cohort who has also undertaken this challenge but isn't shouting to the rooftops like some megalomaniacal songwriting version of Doktor Sleepless about it - the topic was Travelling.
After some early ideas were pushed firmly but politely in the direction of the door I thought it would be fun to write a song featuring my tour dates which are not usually in the most glamorous of places. There are lots of songs about New York and Amsterdam. There aren't that many about Glossop. Or Hull. Or Heaton Park.
I've played every one of the locations named in the song except for Bath where my gig was cancelled because the Green Park Tavern actually did shut down (those lovely folk at the Mother's Ruin in Bristol gave us a second gig to compensate) and Hull. I've always wanted to play the legendary Adelphi in Hull. A lot of my friends rave about the place and its ramshackle charms. However they've never responded to an email. Ah well. It's good to dream. One day I'll play there. In Hull.
This recording was performed live for BBC Introducing…”
The song itself was titled ‘The Neverending Road’. Have a listen to the original…
It feels a little tossed off if I’m honest. A travelogue of towns paired with appropriate rhymes set to a C major-chord plod to give it that ‘travelling feel’. At the time I wasn’t yet feeling overwhelmed by the project but had yet to find the midpoint groove that led to the on-the-bounce writing of some of the better songs from that year. Oh, and 10 years on, I’ve still never played in Hull.
MEANWHILE IN 2023
Or should that be 2022! We’ve been lucky with this song from an archival perspective. I appear to be sitting on a goldmine of stuff here but I’ll set the scene to start with.
In December of 2022 I was over in Australia, playing a couple of shows and visiting some family. We were staying up in Brisbane and (as I can see from the voice note) I awoke from a dream at some time just before 29 minutes past midnight. The dream had been my favourite kind of dream. A long sprawling sunburnt dream that contained music. And I’d been lucky enough to wake up with a snatch of it in my memory. I wandered, still half asleep, into the living room and found a guitar to try and translate what I had been gifted by my subconscious.
The voice note of the very first time I played this melody is here…
Whilst not overly complex, it felt melodically strong. The tune felt compelling to me and I hoped it could become something. You can hear from the recording, I’ve already found my way to the E major for the B section though it sounds like I’m hoping it could become the Chorus at this point. I’ve extended that E chord another bar and then found my way to that F# bass making a nice, unusual chord for me, before looping into some extra jazziness that doesn’t need to be there.
We know from the final version of what the song became that this section was really hankering to become a Pre-chorus, halving the length of the E major and E/F# before settling on a suspended D.
The main thrust of the piece was that A section with the riff moving from the Amaj7 to the E. I could hear that it had a travelling feel but I still didn’t yet know that I was writing a travelling song. I’m 100% sure I knew I was writing this album at that point, or at least, what the album became with Lobelia involved.
The voice note gathered a light film of digital dust in my phone until the first writing weekend with Lo in her front room. We knew that we had ‘Travelling’ as one of the subject matters we could tackle for this album so, I played her the melody on guitar.
LYRICAL WAX
NOW we’re in 2023! I’ve played the voice note to Lobelia at her home studio and we’re playing around these chords while I try to sound out some lyrics over it. There was melody happening but I didn’t want to write the words then and there.
I wanted to write in motion. Specifically I required that fabulously freeing feeling of being on a train, where one’s mind feels like it can wander outside of its usual realms. Obviously there are elements of modern train travel that can make it less than pleasant;** a neverending, overcrowded, overpriced, sweaty tube of human tuna circling the 9th drain of hell. But. When conditions are good, I enjoy train travel a lot. It gives one a panoramic perspective… the windows next to you munching up the countryside, offering up new images and visions pushing your thoughts into the metaphorical and anthropomorphological.
I took a train, I can’t remember where to but I remember I took it for just one purpose; to write this song. I sat in motion with my little orange notepad and wrote the words for what made up the bulk of the verses of this song.
Past the tower that looms
Rising billowing smoke plumes
Blooms and clouds the sky
Like Sauron’s Eye
A proud robot stands
A mechanical man
Carrying our signal
Across the land
For the Chorus, however, we return to Lobelia’s studio but, first, some intimate personal history…
I’ve moved towns a few times in my life. Nothing strange about that. Many have. In fact, I would say I haven’t lived in as many towns as I thought I would have by this point in my life.
In recent years I’ve felt a growing melancholy, intertwined with an anger sitting just below the surface. I never noticed it in my 20’s and it was a muffled voice in my 30’s, but as I venture into my 40’s, I’ve started to explore and interrogate these feelings.
It’s a much longer and more convoluted story than this one, involving historical fleeing Jews, nomadic tendencies, and the invention of the internet but somehow 95% of my living family (and there’s a fair number of them) ended up migrating from all over the world to Australia in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.
Almost all of them. Except me. I had enrolled on a Bachelor of Arts at Preston University to study music (or as I would discover, Avant-Garde music). I was a fresh adolescent exploring the new freedoms of a new city, and the new social circle that I had found through my recently discovered passion for music. I had work in music venues as a barman, a booker and a sound engineer. I had a band of musicians that I called friends who I made music with. Music that I was utterly convinced would whip up a storm of unrelenting success. And I had romantic entanglements that felt, as they always do at that age, like they could end the world itself.
You try telling a 20 year old going through all that to move back in with their parents in a city across the world, that, on the face of it, looks like it has nothing to do with music, culture or imagination and everything to do with surfing and how much one can bench press. I have to say at this point, that once I was afforded the opportunity of touring the place (because of music) that I discovered that Australia and Sydney in particular was drowning in music, culture and imagination but I was still a few years away from that happening.
This concise Copperfield that I’ve painted is to illustrate that these feelings… this melancholy, the anger are most likely linked to some latent abandonment issues and the loneliness that comes from feeling cut off from one’s tribe.
It was this I had in mind when these words sprang from my lips:
To be weightless
To be faithless
To be one without a country
Can be one who belongs everywhere
And nowhere too
That’s the doubled edge I’m discussing here. The ambivalence of the freedom of motion married to the lack of a feeling of somewhere to call ‘home’. The words stuck in my throat and there in the room with Lobelia, playing guitar and trying to sing, I nearly wept. I managed to choke it back just enough but I couldn’t continue singing. The words had cut through, my subconscious had been revealed. This is the true magic of songwriting, one of the things that keeps me thinking it’s my favourite artform to explore. The unconscious exercise giving voice and meaning to something you’ve previously been unable to express. That a song can have that power to move me as I sing it… well that’s everything I’m aiming for when I sit down to write.
SIGN OFF
You’ve made it! Well done! That was a long one to read eh? Honestly it took me ages to write as well. Longform writing doesn’t come naturally to me, I usually feel I can express everything I want in the form of song lyrics. I’ve recently ended my tenure as a teacher which ate up most of the mental energy I reserved for these songwriting blogs so hopefully I’ll be able to contribute more of them for my Bandcamp and Patreon subscribers.
And if you know anyone at The Adelphi in Hull, tell ‘em to book me for a gig will you?
FURTHER LISTENING
FOOTNOTES
* Jess Roberts - see other blogs if this is your first read of one of my songwriting missives. Otherwise you should know who she is and what she meant to the project.
** Apologies to Kurt Vonnegut for the semi-colon. I don’t know what’s come over me.
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