It is a truth universally acknowledged that once you’ve learned how to play the first six The Beatles singles you’ll be in possession of everything there is that you need to know about writing a song. Song writing, I should stress, is not the same as making a record, as John Seabrook’s excellent The Song Machine explains in detail and at length. But I digress. With the benefit of knowing how "one gets the impression that they think simultaneously of harmony and melody, so firmly are the major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat submediant key switches” one can all the more appreciate the “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!”'s that tend to round off those early choruses. Listen and learn, kids, listen and learn. My own personal road map on the way to song writing enlightenment on the other hand, was Neil Young’s Comes a Time. Once I'd reached the point where I could play all the way through the whole album I knew what I wanted to say, how I wanted to say it, and had also developed a penchant for checked shirts, the key of 'G' and battered straw hats that has withstood no little critical opprobrium even to this day.
But the intriguing thing about
those Beatles singles is the stories they tell and the questions they ask. “If there’s
anything that you want..?”, “You think you’ve lost your love…”. Despite any contrary claims regarding the groove, it’s story tellers whose work you have to keep coming back to. Desperado was a
disappointing follow up to Eagles’ debut album sales-wise, but it’s still their
best work, due in no small part to the narrative thread that runs through it. Thin Lizzy’s best
song isn’t Jailbreak, or The Boys are Back in Town or even Don’t Believe a
Word, but the relatively unassuming Southbound*, with its trail-weary
protagonist reflecting on the good old days in the same way that Bruce
Springsteen’s tough young punks from Asbury Park turned into the jaded parents
of The River. Throughout these songs, I want to know what happens in the next verse, the
next chapter. To reach the gloomy denouement**.
At last night’s Doghearsal
we sat down with two chords and a couple of verses of lyrics, trying to make
sense of the narrative and bookend the story of 'As Yet (Untitled)' as best we
could.
I dug out all these
old photographs
The three of us
smiling on New Year’s Day
It’s almost as if it
didn’t happen
And it feels like it’s a century away
...it starts. It’s not like our song Harrogate, which is
a jolly, chirpy four verse country romp about an illicit but ultimately doomed
liaison in a northern spa hotel***. That’s a straight soup to nuts Squeeze song
waiting to happen. This is more opaque. Who are these people? Where have they
met? What are they doing there? What are their regrets? I won’t lie to you –
these are the themes I keep coming back to. There may be a hundred protagonists,
a few dozen parties and a hundred miles of tarmac in the notebooks, scraps of
paper, bookmarks and receipts I’ve scribbled things down on over the years, but
the question is always the same. In common with The Boss, I just want to know if love is real.
We worked on the arrangement. I’d come in with two chords and the
lyrics, intending to workshop the thing into something bigger, but we’d decided
that it didn’t need to break out into a bridge, a chorus, a middle eight – just
to go circling around and around, Mr. Wendell keeping the hypnotic rhythm going
- like the very best of Simon Nicol’s Sloth work - while the rest of us drift
in and out according to mood and inclination. “It’s only two chords” said
someone “It’s not a bit too U2, is it?”
“Fuck ‘em – they didn’t write ‘A’ and ‘D’”
someone replied.
After a while I remembered where I’d heard these inversions
before. Many moons ago our drummer had written a song called Love is Here through the
simple expedient of positioning his hands anywhere on the guitar neck that
sounded good to him, and then moving the odd finger to see what happened. The
verses were based around a repetitive three chord round with lots of open
strings and odd sub-tonics. I’d absorbed, assimilated and re-stumbled upon his
fingering**** for two of them and here we were, some twenty five or six to four
years later bringing them back out into the light of day, or at least the stygian half ten-ness
of a Tuesday night in Coggeshall. Song writing, chord construction, words and
bridges - all there in spades. And he couldn’t play you a Beatles song if his life depended on it.
*And it closes with a great big fuck-off gong. Which is awesome.
**TMFTL
*** Which in turn is not a patch on Scarborough, by Farrah, which covers pretty much the same sort of ground lyrically, but which has a better chorus.
****Easy, tiger.
*** Which in turn is not a patch on Scarborough, by Farrah, which covers pretty much the same sort of ground lyrically, but which has a better chorus.
****Easy, tiger.
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