Song of the week #18

Absent Friends

This is my tribute to my friend Dave Owens who was the bass player and singer in my band. Dave tragically died in 2004 from throat cancer. We had known each other since we were 11 and it was a terrible shock when he died. My first ideas for writing Absent Friends were very different from the finished song. In August 2017 I sketched out these lyrics:

1. At the end of the day when the fire burns down low
And the smouldering embers give out their last glow
It’s a time then to raise a full glass
And remember those friends from the dim distant past
To the memory of all those you've lost in the past

2. There’s a time to look back and a time to move on

I abandoned the song at this point. It never progressed any further for I felt that the song needed a hymn-like treatment - something like the Beatles' Let it Be. So in April of the following year I returned to the song and it took me less than two hours to arrive at a complete set of lyrics. My scrawled notes show that I wrote the first three verses with only a few second thoughts but the lyrics for the final verse (which ends with the line “For we'll all be absent friends”) arrived fully formed without any alterations.

I used a virtual piano on the recording which reproduces the exact sounds of the famous Abbey Road Challen piano. The Beatles used it on Tomorrow Never Knows, Penny Lane, With a Little Help from my Friends, All You Need is Love, Magical Mystery Tour, Your Mother Should Know, Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, Lady Madonna and Martha My Dear. It was also used by Pink Floyd on their Wish You Were Here album. 

In 2024, with a view to making a video for the song, I tweaked the original recording to enhance all the instruments and added a crowd choir at the end. This involved singing 28 individual parts from deep in my bass vocal register to high in my tenor range and then separating them out in the final mix so that they created the illusion of an audience singing along. Soon after I wrote the song in 2018 I had sung it live at a folk club open mike night and was delighted when the audience, unprompted, sang along with me. This was the effect I wanted on the original recording but lacked the technical knowledge of how to achieve it at the time. 

I used AI-generated images for the video and, as was the case with my earlier videos, I rejected far more images than I used. For the final verse I experimented with a split screen divided into four but it was needlessly complicated and distracted the viewer away from the basic simplicity of the song and the moving ending where the hikers have completely vanished.

Click on the link below to view the YouTube video:

Absent Friends

After many a mile of dusty white roads
When the day is drawing to an end
There’s a fireside chair
And stories that we share
And the talk is absent friends

So we raise a glass to those who have passed
And we smile a whispered amen
Never shed a tear
For they are all still here
In our hearts those absent friends

Absent friends. Absent friends
Absent friends. Absent friends

Over mountain, field and forest we go
As we wander time and again
It’s a heavy load
To carry on the road
That we share with absent friends.

Absent friends. Absent friends
Absent friends. Absent friends

For in time we all must travel that way
Though we try to fight it till the end
And we’ll all be there
Without a single care
For we’ll all be absent friends
 

Absent friends. Absent friends
Absent friends. Absent friends
Absent friends. Absent friends