This was one of those songs which I wrote by playing a pair of guitar chords over and over again with my eyes closed, almost in a trance-like state, until gradually a tune began to emerge along with the words “You can tell anybody you want that I’m finally over you”. The perfect marriage of tune with words is something that I am always striving to achieve and I have to say that I’m quite pleased with the result here. Sometimes the words come easily; sometimes they take a lot of crafting; sometimes they arrive like thieves in the night but they rarely arrive when I try too hard to think of them. The best lyrics tend to sneak up on me unawares.
Originally the pair of chords ran through the entire song but I soon realised that the tune for “Doesn’t matter who you choose could be anybody you’ve ever known”, which is identical to the tune of the first line, would fit perfectly over a different set of chords. Very early on, I knew there would be a string quartet accompaniment.
The song was written very soon after the passing of Sir George Martin and I thought it would make a fitting tribute to his genius. However, my model for the arrangement was not Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” as some might think but rather his track “Some Days” from the album “Flaming Pie” which also scored by Sir George. However, the long pedal note played high up by the violins in the last verse WAS consciously modelled on “Yesterday” but I have used an unusual note of the scale for this: not the major third of “Yesterday” but a G note which is discordant to both the A minor and D major chords which run through the verses.
The chorus section “You can say I’ve gone, caught a train at dawn” uses some of my favourite half-line rhymes and assonances: “gone”, “dawn” and “horn” don’t rhyme but they are close enough and sing well. For the second chorus, I found exact rhymes in “fine” “sign” and “county line” and I’m quite pleased with the imagery here. It reminds me a little of Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Lineman”.
The middle section “Ooh all the things that you said” began life as long-held “ooh”s over a series of my favourite chords, including those from Crowded House’s “Weather with You”. Also, it seems that, quite unconsciously, I have used a very similar tune here to that of Genesis’s “Ripples” from “A Trick of the Tail” – pure coincidence, m’lud, honest!
Although I used virtual instruments for the strings and harp parts I was keen to ensure that the music could be played by real string players. Years of studying the string writing of Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Beethoven and, more recently, Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten, paid off here. One day I would love to perform this song with real orchestral musicians…