SONGS

HERE IS THE RIVER
The title song of the album is about Derry. It’s my home town. I have lived here for most of my life. I didn’t set out to write a song about the place. It just developed that way. Here I am a middle aged man living in the city in the first decade of the 21st century. I have watched a new generation grow up. For them the troubles of the recent past are something they have heard about but have little experience or even memory of. The slogans on the wall are fading slowly.

The song is also a love song. There is regret in it of course at the passing of time and maybe the river in the chorus forever running away is a metaphor for that. Most of all though the song is an affirmation of love despite the flags and the emblems and the anthems used by the tribalists  to divide and manipulate us. The sectarians are  practised in using these weapons of division which is why the image of the two cathedrals becoming one on the news bulletin is given a complete verse to itself in the song.

As I mention in the notes on the album, gradually the song became more important to us as the recording of the album progressed and that is reflected in the big arrangement. When Stephen Shaw, who hadn’t heard the song, showed me the projected front cover and I saw those church spires I knew that here was another sign perhaps. It confirmed me in my feeling that the song was the title track.

I’LL GO ALONG WITH YOU
I like this song a lot and I think the swing of the arrangement suits it because it is light hearted and incurably romantic. It’s a little story about a modern elopement with the girl asking the fella instead of  vive versa. There they are walking up that little road with the river wandering by and telling them  that now is their time. The story did remind me of a poem I did at school.. I was thinking of a couple of lines of a poem by John Keats, another romantic, “And they are gone. Aye! Ages long ago, the lovers gone into the night.”

Of all the songs on the album this is the one whose arrangement  puzzled us most. There were I think three or even four false starts. The slow treatments we tried seemed to miss the lightness of spirit of both the melody and the words. That’s what we restored to it when Eddie O’Donnell decided to get a wee ceili band in to jig the song up. We gathered in the car park outside the Foyle Valley Railway. Marie Clarke had arrived from Letterkenny and Seamus O’Kane from Dungiven. Off we went to Blast Furnace, had a couple of run throughs and put the whole thing down live. It’s the live feel of the recording that makes for a lot of its charm.

KING AND QUEEN
The king and queen are two hills on the Inishowen peninsula. They are like two heads looking on to Lough Swilly which is why they are known as the king and queen of Barna or the king and queen of the Minches. I was talking to the fiddler Dinny McLaughlin about an album of his and the artwork on it includes a photo of the two hills. I asked Dinny had they a name and when he told me their name I knew immediately there was a  comic conversation song in the king and queen. As I wrote it the two took on personalities of their own. The king’s very serious indeed. She’s supportive and smarter than him but could perhaps have done with a course in Donegal geography. The melody is very Irish so the subject is appropriate and the landscape and seascape surveyed by the two have many historical connections. Tracey McRory made lovely work of jigging up the melody at the end and  the little mandolin interventions throughout delight me still at every listen, “ God! That’s a good tune!” I say to myself!

NEVER SAY DIE
We got Pat Casey to come up from Dungannon for this one. It’s a song with a bit of a country feel to the arrangement…sweet harmonica and fiddle, courtesy of Pat. It’s quite bluesy as well. I remember playing that harmonica  riff over and over again on the piano when I was writing the tune. I drove the whole house mad in the process. I knew that the tune needed something bright and even cheeky in terms of a lyric. I suppose it’s a song about selfishness and indeed greed but the chorus with the bishop and the actress stop things getting too serious. “As the bishop said to the actress” is a line I’ve heard in comedy routines for years so I thought it was time that I told their full story.

LOVE OF MY HEART
Gra Mo Chroi is a term of affection in Gaeilge writing meaning Love Of My Heart. The song has a big melody and is very Irish and somehow the phrase Love Of My Heart just seemed to fit it  when I came to put the words to the tune. We recorded two versions of the song. I feel this one works better because it is roomier and more atmospheric, especially the contribution of the Hammond organ played by Feargal Murray. Its entry at the end of the first verse gives the whole thing a lonesome feeling. Feargal asked me what style of organ did I want. I knew exactly what I wanted. I wanted Al Kooper Hammond circa 1965 or1966, that “Blonde On Blonde” sound and that is what I got. It is probably the best love song that I have written. They even let me play guitar on this one.

FROM MY WINDOW
When my album “Word OF Spring” was issued in 2000 I sent a copy to the singer Bill Jones. She liked the album but I heard nothing more until a morning in September 2002 when I emailed her to ask would she like a copy of my new single “The Waltz Of The Years”. Within five minutes I got a email from Bill but it wasn’t a reply. She was asking me to do an English translation of the song Tamall Dom on “Word of Spring”. Then another email arrived from her answering my email. “O my God!” she wrote. “This is so strange. We haven’t talked in two years and now this!” It was uncanny alright but the story of the song “From My Window” gets stranger still.

Myself and Dave Duggan, who had written the original Irish lyric, set about an English translation for Bill but it just didn’t work. What sounded poetic in Gaeilge sounded prosaic and dead in English. We just could not get the tone of the original. So we wrote a completely new lyric in English and Bill  liked it enough to make it the opening song of her album. Bill singing “From My Window” got herself featured on an in flight video for Japanese airlines and a Japanese rock band called Brahman heard it. They recorded a rock version of it. The financial rewards have been gratifying.

Eddie O’Donnell decided to treat it very simply, just a resonant acoustic guitar with Marie Clarke playing beautiful accordion. This is one of Marie’s great qualities as a musician. She understood perfectly what was needed right down to that little accordion riff that underpins the whole arrangement.

UNDER THE GREEN OF THE TREES
It’s a waltz. I played this tune on the piano manys the time but not a flicker of  a lyric ever offered itself. It was  watching the film of  Mici MacGabhainn’s  Rotha Mor An Tsaoil that led me to remember a story from the Mayo of my summer holidays in childhood. The decision  to put myself into the story in the final verse was a difficult one. Normally the narrator should remain anonymous but I had a memory to include and I remain on in the narrative to reveal that my vision of the two lovers reunited is true but my placing it in  springtime is  pure imagination. I have never taken such liberties before and there it is, the dyer’s hand revealed in the final garment.

Eddie and Tracey and Marie made mighty contributions as usual. As regards the melody well it was written on a piano in G with plenty of black notes. That is what gives the tune its old world charm. It seemed to me that this tale of years ago suited the spirit of the melody.  And those childhood memories of the Mayo terrain around my mother’s people’s place gave the thing a sure location.

When I had finished the song I wasn’t at all convinced by the title, “Under The Green Of The Trees”. It seemed a bit pedestrian especially the obvious adjective green for the trees. I went over to Brooke Park. It was early summer and I stood under one of the big trees by the wall. I looked up into the tree. Let me tell you that the one word for a tree in summer is green. There is nothing greener anywhere.

ALL THE LOST THINGS
I found a little yellow boat almost buried in the sand at Lisfannon. It made me wonder as I set it on the water what child had owned it and how it had been lost. I was walking out the back hill behind Creggan when I saw a  leather jacket, one arm missing, up in a tree. There was a story there too. But it was a recollection of seeing military medals in a jumble sale in London when I lived there that really focussed this song for me and gathered the other images to it. The lyric is a series of little photographs really. The chorus with its bass rundown has a kind of 1960s feel to it . I like that and Rory Donaghy, who was engineering, even played bass on it.

THE WESTERN WIND
The prevailing wind in Ireland is westerly. A look at the tilt of the trees on the west coast will confirm that. It’s generally mild, sometimes it’s strong and it’s often wet. It is a clean wind, or at least I think of it like that, coming off the Atlantic across the western mountains and into the valleys of Derry. Songwriters  like to attribute human emotions to inanimate objects. It’s the oldest  trick in the book. So why not do the same for a living thing. The western wind is alive.
         Your mind’s made up your course is set
         Your feet are in the ocean yet
         The forests dance beneath your hand
         Your long arms reach across the land

THE SHANGRI LA CAFÉ
I think of it as a standard song or even a jazz song. There are four minors in the chorus alone! That’s really complex for someone like me. And believe me I needed all four to resolve the release back into the verse. It’s a late night radio song. When I finished it I was unsure about the last few lines. The idea was that I find Nirvana but I don’t know I’ve found it until I’ve lost it again. It didn’t convince me. So I changed the ending entirely. As to whether the person I’m still waiting for will turn up…Well! Will you? Is that you peeking out of the window of the Utopia Hotel wondering whether you’ll cross the street or not?
                                                                                                                

I have some great musicians on this album and a song like this one gave them the room to breathe musically…Liam, Eddie, Feargal, Ciaran, Frank. I thank all the contributors. I thank Rory at Blast Furnace. I think this is my best album. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I?