Song of the week #20

Tell Them I'm Gone

This was one of the first songs I wrote after deciding I would take up songwriting in my retirement. It is included on my first album Better Late and I am still very proud of it. 

Like many subsequent songs, I wrote it 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 and words is something that I am always striving to achieve and 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.

The second line was originally “Doesn't matter who you choose could be anybody you've ever spoken to” but it felt ungainly and I changed it almost immediately to “Doesn't matter who you choose could be anybody you've ever known”

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. Tell Them I’m Gone was written very soon after the passing of Sir George Martin and I thought it would make a fitting tribute to the genius of the “fifth Beatle”. However, my model for the arrangement was not Paul McCartney’s Yesterday as might be supposed but rather his track Some Days from the album Flaming Pie which was 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 their album A Trick of the Tail – pure coincidence, m’lud, honest!

Although I used virtual instruments for the strings and harp parts I made sure 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.

The original version of this song was finished and posted to YouTube in April 2016 but I returned to the track later that year with the benefit of all that I had learned about ProTools in the intervening six months, so the string quartet sounds have been reshaped and the vocals re-recorded.

Click on the image below to play the YouTube video:

Tell Them I'm Gone

You can tell anybody you want that I’m finally over you
I don’t care who you choose could be anybody you’ve ever known
You could say that our story is told and has finally overrun
Though in truth we were never two hearts that were beating as one

You could say I’ve gone, caught a train at dawn
Took a taxicab waiting there blowing its horn
You can say what you want just as long as you tell them I’m gone

You could tell a lie to explain just why I’m no longer there
Doesn’t matter what you say, choose a way, ‘cos I really don’t care
You can see in my face there’s no trace of the feelings I felt for you
You can hear in my voice no alternative choice to be made

You could say I’m fine, that I’ve seen the sign
For a freight train heading for the county line
You can say what you want just as long as you tell them I’m gone

Ooh All the things that you said
Were they just dreams drifting round in your head
Never acted on. Dead and gone

You can tell anybody you want that I’m finally over you
I don’t care who you choose could be anybody you’ve ever known

You could say I’ve gone, caught a train at dawn
Took a taxicab waiting there blowing its horn
You can say what you want just as long as you tell them I’m gone
Tell them I’m gone. Tell them I’m gone. Tell them I’m gone. Tell them I’m gone