Behind Calendar II // When I'm Drunk

This is the seventh of my ongoing series of blog posts on the Making Of my album as Granfalloon, Calendar - Chapter 2. To start at the very beginning and read my Making Of series for Volume 1, go here.

TRACK 7: WHEN I’M DRUNK

SUBJECT - Alcohol and the imbibing thereof

OPENING RAMBLE

Let’s dive into this with our usual disregard for the linear timeline… at the time of writing I’ve recently moved to the Netherlands. I say “recently”… it’s been 3 or so months now. When I was still in Manchester, I’d gotten into an excellent routine of writing this blog every Thursday  morning at one of the numerous excellent and poncey cafes that Chorlton-cum-Hardy has to offer. And given that I’m migrating the older posts from my website to Substack and only peppering in these bang-up-to-date missives for now meant that, given the prolific writing I was doing, I’d built up quite the buffer of material before I needed to write any more songwriting deep dives.*

This is the first time I’ve sat down to write one of these since moving to the Low Countries.

Anyway, all of this is the scenic route to saying, this is my first piece of writing in a while. I might be a bit rusty. Please be gentle as I dust off the cobwebs and remember how to form sentences. Now, to work! Or more accurately as this blog is about a drinking song…*raises glass* To drink!

I’ve long had a complicated relationship with alcohol. I got drunk for the first time at the age of 12 and it was a hospital-worthy occurrence. I had snuck (a lot of) alcohol at a school friend’s bar mitzvah, become intoxicated, vomited on the owner of a department store and fainted in the chicken before waking up in hospital a few hours later to the face of my mother, apoplectic with both rage and concern.

My parents were good parents of the 80’s and 90’s who erred on the side of prohibition and forbiddence**. This meant that things like alcohol, cigarettes, drugs and even post-watershed television comedy programmes*** were distant and exotic dangers. I suppose that might make a boy curious.

I was always a weird kid, I guess, not comfortable with social interactions and rarely understanding the political machinations and mechanics that were bubbling under the dynamics of the people around me. I was naive and immature for my age. I was pretentious, and prone to histrionics and melodrama. I tended to fall to flights of fancy, living in a world, mostly inside my mind. I know, I sound like a treat to know eh? As a result, I think I found it difficult to make friends when I was younger and it was possible that most of my contemporaries found me a little off-putting.

As a matter of record, I only have memory of the world starting to slow down and make some kind of sense once I really discovered music at the age of 16 or 17 and, as a matter of speculation, I count my social life as really beginning once I left home and moved to Preston… maybe even only after the 3 years of my studies were up did I really feel like the world was something that maybe had a place for me and that I could navigate it. There were two things that precipitated this…

1. I met Richey Evans and Paddy Daly, whom I formed my first band with.

2. I began working at a music venue called The 12 Bar.

The band was called Shotgun Faeries. Hopefully you’ll be forgiving about this. It was the first band name I’ve ever come up with after all. I wanted something hard, like a weapon, next to something soft and fantastical… there were worse options brainstormed… believe me. Influences included… The Clash and The Beatles on my part, The Wildhearts on Richey’s and Sepultura and Cannibal Corpse on Paddy’s. We were, as you can imagine, a bit of a mess… Classic songwriting filtered through vaguely metal sounding guitars delivered with the punky energy that stems from youth and not-being-very-good at your instrument.

I’ve spoken about The 12 Bar before in these blogs but I'll give a brief precis. The 12 Bar was a music venue that was opened on Church Street in the centre of Preston, Lancashire by a couple named John and Be in 2003. It hosted a mixture of local bands, touring artists and tribute acts. It was the first music venue I’d worked at and most likely the first music venue I’d ever spent any real amount of time in.

And I spent a LOT of time there. I worked there, quickly moving from barman to barman/sound engineer/booker. I rehearsed there with Richey and Paddy and whichever drummer was giving us their 3 months of commitment. The band played their first gig there. I ran the open mic sometimes. We hung out there. And we drank there.

Richey, Paddy and I also worked together at Ye Olde Blue Belle further up Church Street and closer to the prison. This place was everything that those old’e’ world’e’ ‘E’s in the name try to bely… it was like something out of an old storybook. It was a Sam Smith’s brewery-owned which meant an emphasis on drinking, and keeping those drinks cheap. It attracted serious drinkers. But also people of a “certain age” who wanted an environment they were comfortable with. Where they could make jokes at friends’ expense if they wanted but could also ruminate in silence if they were of a mind. The pub had two snugs… one at either side of the bar. In the one snug and side of the bar, were a couple of white collar workers and those that worked in the prison up the road. On the other side were mostly manual labourers, and those that had maybe spent some time as a guest in said prison. There wasn’t a strict divide. It wasn’t like there was a turf war. People moved around freely and interacted with whoever they pleased but these were mostly their starting positions when they came in for that first drink.

Those that drank in the Blue Belle were mostly, after initial suspicions at my youth, Southern accent, and general ‘new-ness’ were incredibly warm and prone to the kind of infectious, good natured humour that I’ve come to associate with my 13 years in Preston. There was sharp humour, there were stories, there was music, there were friends.

And as most of this took place in pubs and music venues, there was booze.

Booze… it was at the centre of the social environment. It loosened the inhibitions. It slowed my speech and made my hyperactive brain a little less so. It made me care a little less what others thought of me. The jokes! The fun! The music! Who wouldn’t want these nights to go on forever?

Booze holds a romantic place in the canon of art, literature and music.. It conjures images of Byron and Shelley… poets! Shane McGowan standing on the mountain in the storm using nothing but his own mental detritus to battle with the elements.

And then factor in that romantic place that alcohol has long been afforded in the creative worlds of art, literature and music, and you have a recipe that is liable to combust. A line that one can easily fall over the edge of. As I did, often in those times, and much more rarely even to this day. And the consequences can be disastrous. Disastrous to health. Disastrous to friendships. Disastrous to people and their lives.

Such is the complicated nature of my relationship with alcohol. It has, for better or worse, been at the centre of my social and musical world for the entirety of this 25 year old century.

A subject so big then, must be explored by the constant songwriter.

WRITING IN 2014

Enough context for you?

Here’s some more. I’d had the title ‘When I’m Drunk’ for a long time before I attempted to write the song. A few years at least. This will happen sometimes when I know I want to write about a concept that I feel might be very rich or a subject that I find interesting. The idea itself begins to gain a gravity that makes it scary to write about. Can I do it justice? Can I be honest enough? Can I be interesting enough? Such concerns can turn a fearful writer into a coward, forever putting off that which might not live up to the image of the idea that you have projected into that night sky in your mind. Will it be ‘Beouwulf’? Will it be’ The Dark Tower’? Will it be ‘Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror’? Or ‘The Book of Love’? And if it can't, why bother?

I remember the night I came up with the title. It was the early hours. I was at the house of a man named Moggy. And I was drunk. Keith ‘Moggy’ Morgan was a wonderful man who has since sadly departed us and is much missed. He was a larger than life figure on the Preston music scene. He was a musician and a music fan. He was such a music fan, he would become enraptured with the artists he went to see at the various music venues of Preston and demand they accompanied him back to his for the carousing and listening to records until the early hours. Many of us, who were around at that time, have deeply fond memories of misspent nights with Moggy where he would stop the current song halfway through, excitedly thow the next record on and proclaim in a loud voice: “Listen to this! It’s the saddest song IN THE WORLD!” before entertaining us all with a rendition of his locally renowned poem ‘The Cat is in The Curry’.

It was one of these nights that, just as everyone was succumbing to sleep or unconsciousness, I was overcome with the desire to write a song called ‘When I’m Drunk’ and for that song to contain these lyrics…

This concertina walking

Will never get home

My feet missing in action

My legs are two trombones

As I fumble for a lighter

Scream I’m a lover not a fighter

But these days it’s neither

I’m much cop at

When I’m drunk

You’re my best friend

The lights suggest a lock-in

At the old Moorbrook tonight

You will find me on the pool table

Triumphant and supine

That’s as far as I got before the ‘magic’ ran out (more about magic later). The idea and words went into mothballs building up gravity and becoming ever more fearful a subject to tackle.

I moved from Preston to Manchester in 2013**** and after 6 months out of work, trying to find places, people and work that was open to me (o how I sympathise with you 2013-Richard, from my 2025-history repeating vantage point). My first job in Manchester was putting on acoustic gigs at a bar in Didsbury called Mary & Archie’s. It was a night that had been started by Tom Blackwell and he’d booked a couple of acts, had to go away on tour and called me to come and cover the hosting of the night. He’d booked a couple of acts that night, both called Tim. I jumped at the work. The night in question will be covered at length in the next blog entry as it forms the basis of my song, ‘Shh!’ but the upshot is that I met Tim Holehouse that night.

Tim is a touring musician who specialises in the cigar box guitar and stompbox sound that is most associated with parts of the blues and early Tom Waits records. We bonded over booze and Tom Waits and we even went on a small tour together in 2014. And as a musician in my orbit in the year I was trying to write 52 songs, it seemed natural to ask Tim to come and write one of those songs with me. Given our shared interests of Tom Waits and booze, maybe a drinking song… Hmm… maybe there was a song about drinking that I had the germ of an idea for waiting scribbled in a notepad somewhere?

All of this seems like stars aligning right? An idea whose time had finally come. Except… weirdly no.

As we sat to write, it was apparent that Tim and I had vastly different approaches to the process of songwriting. The prolific amount of writing I’d done, even that year, had given me an openness to the process and a willingness to go along with how other writers might want to work. I fervently believe that there is no ‘one’ way to write a song. That you can get there almost ANY way. But Tim seemed reluctant to open up to the process.

I suspect he’s a musician who likes to keep the mystery and the romance of the songwriting as something indefinable. Something that can’t be explained. A lot of writers feel this way. They may be worried that, if they look directly at the beast, they will ruin whatever “magic” or ju-ju or primal life force they feel they’ve tapped into. Now that might work for him but I think, if you’ve read this far, you’ll probably know that definitely doesn’t work for me.

I think that the creation of music and the process of songwriting can be discussed and analysed without ruining the, for want of a better word, “magic”. In fact, I think that “magic” is the PERFECT word because no matter how much you analyse, try to explain or understand about music and songwriting, there remains something indecipherable, implacable and inexplicable about it. That is, for me, the perfect description of magic. 

If I’m leaning on the old Arthur C.Clarke adage that: “...any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” then we’re certainly in the ballpark of how I feel about music and songwriting. So I don’t worry about scaring away the magic. I feel that this analysis only brings it closer to me.

Anyway it felt like an anathema to Tim, who wanted to sit and jam in an open tuning and see what happened. Discussing anything seemed to make him uncomfortable, making it difficult to try anything unexpected melodically or harmonically. It didn’t take long for the song to fall into a traditional slide blues riff with some vaguely silly lyrics provided by myself talking about “glasses” and “asses” thrown around the words I’d written back in Moggy’s house in Preston.

What did I write about it at the time? Let’s consult the 2014 diary:

Written with Tim Holehouse whilst on tour.

Blogs to follow when I get home. I promise.

We planned to write two song(s). A drinking song. Whilst drinking. And a hangover song. Whilst hungover.

We only got as far as the drinking song of course.

Looks like I'll be writing the hangover one alone.

I seem reluctant here, to discuss the 2014 ‘When I’m Drunk’ in detail. Which was always a clue that I didn’t particularly like the song. Sorry Tim.

Looks like ‘When I’m Drunk’ became a prime candidate for the rewriting project that was Calendar - Chapter II.

MEANWHILE IN 2023

I was packing my bag the night before heading down to Lobelia’s studio in Birmingham to begin work on this rewriting project. I had sent her lists of song titles and subject matters. Vague categories and subdivisions were forming. I had some which maybe we might want to steal chords from, some we might want to salvage lyrics from and in those lists I saw ‘When I’m Drunk’s’ title sat… lounging on the page leering back at me insouciantly. Cheeky bugger.

I knew I had those lyrics from that night at Moggy’s. That was clean, hard fought writing. Those words were a solid start. Hell, I think I’d recited those lyrics over every pub night blues jam and rehearsal room experiment since I wrote them in the mid-2000’s.

But I didn’t know how much I would need to bring to the table for mine and Lobelia’s session yet. It seems strange to think now that there was a time that I wasn’t convinced of the alchemical excellence that existed between us when we write and play together but at this point we'd only had a couple of attempts at writing together and always when we were en route to something else. We hadn’t come up with anything we were convinced with yet.

I was marshalling the material. Figuring out what was in what kind of state. Which song or idea or title belonged on which lists so I could walk into sit with Lo and have something. And it was during this that I picked up my guitar and played around with some chords and FINALLY wrote the Chorus of ‘When I’m Drunk’! It had an anthemic quality which I normally don’t dig but there was something compelling about it. The unusual nature of that for me made it something different for me to sing. It seemed simple. Too simple? Anyway I put the guitar down and finished packing.

I arrived at Lo’s the following day with a Chorus and lyrics to a verse that I was convinced of. It surely would have been one of the five we tackled that first creatively explosive morning we sat to write. I would have most likely played Lo what I had musically (the Chorus) and seen where she thought it should go. Lo’s background in Country & Americana stood us in good stead here. She naturally gave that Chorus somewhere to dismount that allowed its anthemic nature not to become too broad or saccharine. It was one of those classic ‘Stop! THAT chord!’ moments which we’ve been lucky enough to share so often. I think the song started to remind a bit of the songwriting of Mark ‘E’ Everett by this point and I never have any problem with that. I’m a big fan of Eels and their music, and they’re far enough away from my own voice that I don’t worry about injecting some of that into my music.

One thing to note about the chord progressions for ‘When I’m Drunk’ is that the Chorus ends on an F Major and then doesn’t move off of that. So the Verse then starts in F Major. This lack of chord movement between sections has bothered a couple of other songwriting collaborators in the past. Some people get real twitchy about starting the next section of a song with the same chord you just finished with. But I’m a believer in the ‘whatever works’ methodology and this worked. Actually scratch that… 

As I’m typing here I’m realising that I used to get twitchy over this as well! Something about that lack of chord movement felt lazy and I was worried that the sections of my songs wouldn’t be distinguishable from each other. So I 100% get where they’re coming from. I suppose that over time I’ve experimented enough and learned to have faith in others' ideas and it’s worked out! I must have completely revisioned my history there. “No zealot like a convert” and all that. One of the things I’m finding gratifying about this blog is honestly reevaluating my past and experiences through this songwriting lens. It allows me to explore so much. I guess I’m a ‘whatever works’ guy now.

The Bridge or B section of the song that gets us to the Chorus from the Verse must have been sparked by mine and Lo’s jamming. It’s guitar heavy and instrumental, which is unusual for me, but I find the harmonies arresting. It gets us from A to B*****. Whatever works eh?

WHEN I'M DRUNK - demo from 2023 writing session with Lobelia

The demo from March 2023 is from the second session when Lo came up to visit me. The song is almost fully fleshed out here with the Middle Eight in place as well as the Beatles-y Outro.

LYRICAL WAX

Anyway, back to 2023, I sang my ‘cast-iron’ Verse over Lo’s chords and it melded perfectly. We brainstormed lyrics for the second Verse. There are a lot of words in this section that don’t feel like they’re in ‘my voice’ which gives me a great indication that Lo’s came up with them.

There’s some next level nonsense

That I just can’t ignore

But a few drinks in

I feel better than before

“Next level nonsense” is definitely a Lobelia phrase!

It’s not that I’m reliant

On the paraffin they pour

I just need a little something

To grease the wheels

Just need a little something

To grease the wheels

This feels more like me. There’s the analogous automobile phraseology linking in with each other, the alliteration of “the Paraffin they Pour” and the weird extra go around the Chord progression to repeat the last line. Although if memory serves that last repeated line just felt like something we both needed to do! If you, dear reader, are a writer or I suppose any kind of creative yourself, you might be familiar with the feeling. That sensation of weight and gravity dragging… pulling you in the direction of where the piece wants to go. I’m not the most mystical guy but I can’t deny that I’ve felt that feeling. All too often in my writing.

The Middle Eight lyrics refer to some mispent late nights and mornings at The Moorbrook pub in Preston. I can’t remember if I’ve discussed this establishment but I know I’ve taken up so much of this blog entry with the various watering holes of Preston that I’ll try to keep it brief.

The Moorbrook was a pub around the corner from where I lived. It only ‘opened’ at midnight and then stayed open until the sun was rising. You could only gain entry if you went and tapped on the back window when a white-bearded would eventually appear and shout “what bloody time do you call this then?” at you through the glass before throwing open the back door and ushering you into a bar room filled with smoke and brown wood. Invariably the music playing would be either ‘Kind of Blue’ by Miles Davis OR ‘Back To Black’ by Amy Winehouse. The white-bearded publican was called Jim. And he was a big Amy Winehouse fan.

PRODUCTION

Almost every song from this album was recorded in June 2023, live in my studio, The Dogan. Both Lobelia and I were in the room together singing and playing guitar at the same time. It infuses these recordings with something special for me, and gave me a solid basis to add some overdubs too.

Dom Major was on engineering duty for this session and was invaluable in the sessions. Lobelia and I struggled playing in sync at the very start of the session. Call it ‘red light fever’ or whatever. 9 times out of 10 it can be down to a musician just sitting in an uncomfortable position and not making the space their own but we’d taken the time to do that. It was Dom that suggested dialling in some scratch drum tracks for us to play to, when that happened. It was an excellent suggestion and gave us the push and pull we needed for this song which, in particular, has a more than your average number of tempo changes.

GUITAR NERDERY ALERT

I’m not usually prone to guitar nerdery. It’s usually just the nearest available block of wood I can use to write a song and I tend to tune out when people begin discussing their ‘humbuckers’. If I’m 100% honest, I don’t know what a ‘humbucker’ is. I know that’s fairly closed-minded. I’m intending to learn more about humbuckers one of these days. I might even learn what one is.

Anyway, the guitars I had on offer for use this session were my usual selection:

• An Aria parlour guitar with steel strings

• A Cordoba Spanish style hybrid with nylon strings

• An Eko 12-string guitar with steel strings

• A Rickenbacker electric (of mysterious model)

I tried them all for the recording session for ‘When I’m Drunk’ and none of them sounded right. None of them have that ‘big strummy’ sound that a nice dreadnought guitar, or even an orchestra guitar will give you. The closest would be the 12-string but it was waaaaaay too full with all of those high ringing strings and lovely overtones. It ate up the whole frequency range so it was struck off the list.

The other two guitars are beautiful for finger-picking but for the ‘big strummy’, they sound empty and lacking (sorry guys). The thing is, I don’t often do the ‘big strummy’ in my songs so having a guitar around for it is low on the list of priorities but every so often, a song comes along that needs it… (‘When I’m Drunk’, ‘Hotel X’, ‘Rushmore’) I have to ask around to borrow a decent dreadnought.

We were just about to break for an hour to spend time messaging and calling various friends in an attempt to get hold of one when I remembered I did have one orchestra guitar in the house. It was an old Garrison guitar that I’d had since about 2006. It was a gigging guitar at one point but due to an unfortunate accident in 2016 involving a badly installed wall hook, it had a long crack twisting all the way down its neck. It was never the same since the accident and I got ‘into’ parlour guitars.

In a last chance punt to save ourselves a couple of hours of finding a guitar and then going to pick it up I pulled ‘Jorge’ Garrison out of mothballs and hastily tuned it. It actually sounded perfect for this sound and, dare I say, the uneven intonation added a slightly woozy or drunken quality to match the lyrical themes of the song.

Garrison make great guitars actually. The company was a Canadian one founded by Chris Griffith. I’ll let Wikipedia do a little heavy lifting here:

Garrison Guitars were crafted using innovations including the Griffiths Active Bracing System (GABS), a revolutionary method of guitar construction that took over six years to perfect. The single unit brace combined all the acoustic guitar's top braces into a single unit to allow for resonance to have an uninterrupted path of travel throughout the instrument and provided enhanced structural stability.

You can read more here but the long and short of it is, the manufacturing technique not only gave this lovely resonance but also allowed them to sell at a lower pricing point. I’m sure any followers of late stage Capitalism can see where this is going. Garrison was acquired by Gibson Guitar Corporation in 2007 under the promise they’d be incorporating Garrison’s wonderful GABS design into their own Songmake line. Needless to say they did not do this and promptly shut down the factory in Canada in 2010 meaning no more beautifully resonant Garrison guitars are being produced and making ‘Jorge’ quite the rarity.

I wish I’d known that before I asked an artist friend of mine to paint lyrics all over it for a music video and then dropped it from 8 feet in the air.

WHEN I'M DRUNK - Album version

SIGN OFF

That was quite the all nighter wasn’t it? A sprawling pub crawl through the history of how this song came to be. It’s the longest I’ve written by a considerable margin and also contains some personal stuff that I’d not shared publicly****** before. Thanks for sticking with me to the end, dear reader. See you next time for ‘Shh!’ - story of the night of my first music job in Manchester.

FURTHER LISTENING

The Piano Has Been Drinking by Tom Waits

Tom Traubert’s Blues by Tom Waits

Gin House Blues by Nina Simone

What Good Can Drinking Do? by Janis Joplin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fyQ1k94boE

Between The Bars by Elliott Smith

Here Comes A Regular by The Replacements

So What by Miles Davis

Thank You For Making Me Feel… Better by Linus of Hollywood

FOOTNOTE CORNER

*Those of you who have been paying attention up until now will realise that this is reminiscent, indeed, of my actual songwriting. Personality quirk? Deep seated insecurity? Armchair psychiatrists: please let me know in the comments.

**Coining it. Don’t write in.

***This may be a large piece of my puzzle. I speak about this theory of my ‘origin story’ in this interview here. [LINK?]

****The time it stuck anyway.

*****Unintentional pun, I promise. Caught it on the proofread.

******i.e. On the internet.