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The Boy With The Golden Smile

I think this is one of the top 2-3 songs I’ve ever written and I’m pretty proud of it. Why? That’s because i) it manages to have all the dentist-inducing saccharine that you expect from a sugary pop song yet whilst, ii) structurally I think it’s bulletproof, iii) it’s really one of the few times lyrically I’ve been able to tell a story which I think needs no further explanation.

Lyrically, this song is about the creator of the fraudster scam which to this day still bears his name, Charles (Carlo) Ponzi. I guess you can blame Vanity Fair, and there detailed trawl through the mess that Bernard Madoff left behind him. I could have written a song about him, however, there’s just no sympathetic angle. None. Whatsoever. So Mr Ponzi it was, a far more fruitier, interesting tale, that owes much to the building of modern America.

Listen to The Boy With The Golden Smile

Go!

Go! is a prickly breakup song with a great acoustic guitar track. One of those instances where I don’t even know how I came up with the track, let alone recorded it. I do remember that it was the second song I completed for FAWM 2009. 

The one thing that always amazes me about these timed songwriting challenges is how one is able to get these songs written and recorded in such a short space of time. Just shows what you can do when you let go.

Listen to Go!

Illogical World

I don’t know when or where or, even, why I wrote this song, but I do know it’s been in my live set since the absolute beginning and must therefore go down as one of the first songs I ever wrote.

I had never really wanted to record it because it always felt like a song that just “wasn’t ready enough” (whatever that means), but one evening during the recording sessions for The Price Of Love EP, I gave it a shot.

Listen to Illogical World

Adolf Hitler In Drag

A collaboration with Sean T Wright (who is a songwriting and recording machine, btw - check out his website). This came completely out of the blue, and is from the 2009 50/90 songwriting challenge. The title drew me in, and the lyrics

Back in the day, when I was just a guitarist with oodles and oodles of tapes filled with riffs and chord progressions, I often worked with lyricists who were not musicians and who didn’t sing. Meaning it was usually left for me to write the music and melody line to someone else’s lyrics. Which is exactly what I did here.

Listen to Adolf Hitler In Drag

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Bonnie & Clyde

I have such warm fuzzy feelings about this song and, in particular, this recording. The song itself was written in 10 mins as pretty much the last substantial contribution to my first ever FAWM, in February 2007. Don’t know what was going on that year, but I remember quite clearly the first vestiges of spring were just beginning to dispel the wintry gloom.

There’s something about the lolloping guitar track and the deadpan multi-tracked vocals that just was completely right place right time, and the lyrics are about some of those egotistical morons in power who we know about, who never take responsibility for their (usually disastrous) actions.

Listen to Bonnie & Clyde

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Mama, I’m Sick Of These Blue Jeans

First up in the Curating Everything series is track 15, ‘Mama, I’m Sick Of These Blue Jeans’. Written and recorded as part of the 50/90 songwriting challenge in 2009, this song came title first. Like a lot of writers, from time to time I write down random strung-together words that I think might make good titles, or a good springboard for a lyrical idea, and this was one of them. My imagery, when writing the lyrics, was of some weary cowboy or cowgirl stuck out in the middle of nowhere… in a backwater somewhere… wanting to make a change for the better in their life, hence the bluesy, Budweiser-on-the-porch-in-the-dead-of-night feel that the music has.

Listen to ‘Mama, I’m Sick Of These Blue Jeans’.

Just before Christmas (i.e. about three weeks ago), I finally put up my demos, bsides and outakes release, Everything. I think of as a lot of carrot with a little bit of stick. It is available now as a free download, either track-by-track or in one whole bundle.

From its whopping track count (20), you might be under the impression that I just threw everything including the kitchen sink on it. But that’s not the case. I’ve omitted almost as many songs, in an attempt to capture something with Everything, that is basically a document of my five-year journey as a songwriter, singer-songwriter, and music-making-producer-type-person. It kind of shuts the door on a part of my life, a part of my experience, and I really, really don’t know where that new slightly-ajar door leads. Some extra tracks will be made available to mailing list subscribers, which serve to paint a slightly clearer picture.

I always think of curating in terms of museums and whatnot, but it seems like a go-to word these days for covering anything which involves any kind of subjective artistic choice. So what the hell? I’m gonna run with that ball. All the tracks on Everything have been chosen with care, and with a view to conveying this journey of mine. I’ll be following up this post with (brief) periodic bites of information about each of the tracks. They won’t be in tracklisting in order.