THE  SONGS
1. ARROW AND HEART
We were in Donegal for a couple of days and on the 1st of October I was walking from Linsfort to Buncrana across the beaches on Lough Swilly along the way …Linsfort, Stragill, Porthaw …it’s a delightful walk.  I got to the lifeboat station at Ned’s Point.  Just on the far side of it on the little stretch of sand below where the path turns up into the trees I found a message written on the sand.  There was a big arrow and heart and inside it were the words … “Sharon Loves John” … and I think the other word was “always” but it may have been “forever”.
 
It was the waves on the shore that put me in mind of the central question contained in the chorus of the song:-
 
And when the waves wash the words from the beach
The lover’s names swept from the sand
Arrow and heart do the words whisper still
In the sea’s song here on the strand
 
I went on along the path through the trees, took the old bridge across the Crana river and when I got back I wrote down the lover’s names and tried to coherently put down on paper the idea about the words and the waves that had occurred to me.  Eventually I was able to formulate it into a song lyric.  I still wonder sometimes about what became of Sharon and John. 
 
2  THE SONGTHRUSH AND THE WREN
The idea of birds and animals observing the behavioural peculiarities of humanity is not a new one.   It does have some fine comic possibilities though.   I am very fond of this song because the inquisitive thrush and the wise old wren are such a good double act.  Eddie O’Donnell made a great job of the arrangement because it is so appropriate.  We have two birds chatting about the two lovers almost like the two guitars duetting on the recording.  We recorded the whole song in one take … the very first take in the studio that night. Mik O’Connell, who was engineering that evening, said, “That sounds pretty good to me!” I strummed and sang and Eddie played the hard parts.  Listen to those harmonic notes! 
 
The line that gave me the most bother is in the third chorus.  I tried lots of variations but none seemed to work … “They are so bloody serious” … was one and I recall something awful like … “I dislike their pomposity” … Eventually I hit the nail right on the head :-
 
“Aren’t they so sanctimonious”
 
The words run and swing with the line and they have that most important ingredient in a song lyric … singability … and I was delighted with myself for being able to make use of such a big unwieldy word as “ sanctimonious”:-
 
“Where’s the laughter of love”
 
Where indeed? ... and that’s the point of the song really.
 
 
3. TIME AND AGAIN
To my ear this is the sweetest song on the album.  It’s small and self contained like a sonnet.  As I wrote the melody on the piano it began to almost take on the feel of a classical piece.  I knew that it had to be a love song and I knew that a love lyric is the most difficult of all.  It is arduous to find something new to say about love so the words began to talk about time and how we perceive its passing and I related this theme to love.  The central idea of “the bright blue day” that stretches far away I got I think from something that the songwriter Colum Sands said to me one time.  He grew up on a farm in County Down and it’s a fine summer and they get all the work done and still the weather is fine and his father looks at another beautiful day and he says to them … “What are we going to do with this great day”.
 
4  THE WALTZ OF THE YEARS
This is the title track on the album.  My mother has lived with us since my father died in 1995.  I talk to her sometimes about him.  It seems to ease her loss.  I think about my father quite a bit and sometimes he is alive in my dreams, vividly alive and younger than I am now.  From talking to people of my age it seems that this is in no way unusual.  When I wrote the melody I sensed a sentimental or nostalgic element to it. It became a song about a memory, a happy memory I have of my mother and father.  I can see my father singing some old song in the small kitchen in our house in the Bogside inDerry.  For a bit of a laugh he starts waltzing my mother round the floor and they are laughing and happy and very much in love and the song commemorates that.  The conclusions that I have to draw in the song about the nature of this waltz of the years are realistic… “darling soon enough the dancing is done”… such is life but I think the final line, “out and we’ll dance in the sun” is an affirmation of both life and love.
 
The song was issued as a single in the autumn of 2002.  It wasn’t for sale.  It was issued as a promotional device for the album to follow.  I sent it to a lot of radio stations and it got substantial airplay.  One of the main reasons for its popularity is the chorus singing of Mary Dillon.  The first time I heard Mary Dillon sing I was stunned by the wonder of her voice.  She went on to sing for years with the band Deanta and her recording with them of the old ballad “The Green Fields OF Canada” is one of the greatest recordings I have ever heard.  I asked Mary to sing the chorus with me and she recorded two harmony vocals for us and she was gone again in less than half an hour.  But when we listened we knew the difference she had made to the song.
 
5  THE ELECTRIC LIGHT
Any decent history of twentieth century Ireland will devote some space to the significance of the rural electrification programme both north and south of the border.  It brought huge benefits to the people and changed their lives entirely … washing machines and milking machines for starters.  And I was there.  I saw it happen.  I spent my summer school holidays in County Mayo with my mother’s people.  I remember one day we were saving hay and across the river I could see the poles being set up to bring the wires into Robbie Moore’s farm.  The following year when I returned all the lamps had been put away. We had electricity too. 
 
The old people used to tell stories of hauntings and curses laid on landlords and fairies and places you should never venture alone for fear of never coming back to tell the tale.  I would ask my big cousins Sean and Eamon about these eerie and exciting stories and they’d say, “Ah the electric light put an end to that ould stuff”. So I saw the older Ireland pass away.  I was there when it happened. It went not with a lament played on the pipes but with the flick of a switch.  This song “The Electric Light” is an attempt perhaps at a requiem.
 
6   AND OCTOBER TURNED TO GOLD
“And October Turned To Gold” contains two of my favourite musical moments on the album.  The first is Eddie O’Donnell’s lovely little guitar vignette in the middle and the second is Marie Clarke’s beautiful, poignant accordion. From the moment the accordion enters the song is transformed.
 
It struck me as I wrote the tune that there was almost something childlike about it. It had some childlike innocent quality about it I thought. When you are making a melody on a piano it can assume a kind of persona of its own.  I sometimes do talk to my tunes especially when they try to lead me astray.  I have shouted in my time , “Ha! Ha! You don’t fool me that easily!  I know that tune you are trying to con me into accepting.  It’s Herman’s Hermits “No Milk Today”.
 
When it came to this lyric I tried to convey the feel of the melody through the words as well.  That’s why I use the words of a fable or a fairy tale.  I have never tried anything impressionistic like this before.  Like an abstract painting the words mean nothing in particular and everything overall.
 
7  HARD TOWN
IT is my memory of this song that it turned out to be the one that took the longest to get to grips with.   Eddie O’Donnell had to restructure the chorus for me because while it made perfect sense to my ear it made no musical sense at all.  I have always been a solo performer.  I have never played in a band so I have no real sense of musical discipline.  If I feel like putting in an extra couple of bars I will.  It can sometimes lead to creating something unexpected that is all the better for it.  It can also lead to being told, “Musically you can’t do that” at which point I invariably quote something Burt Bacharach said one time about his early song writing … “Guys kept saying to me, “Burt you can’t do that!  There are only three bars there.”  And Burt said, “I lost a couple of good songs that way”.
 
Once we got things sorted out we were fine.   It is a song with a melody that is the closest to the style of an old Irish slow air that I have ever written.  I am proud of that because I believe myself to be a songwriter very much in the Irish song tradition.  I have been asked whether the hard town in question is my home city of Derry.  Well it has aspects of Derry in it. We had thirty years of a very dirty war on all sides here and it has made the town and the people harder.  I wonder how the likes of people I grew up with could hold a man’s family hostage and tie him to a bomb and make him drive it to his own and others certain deaths.  It happened in my town.  The city is also nearly twice the size of the place I grew up in.  So it has become a much more anonymous place.  But no, I wouldn’t locate the song in Derry.  It’s more general than that. It’s a song about good people anywhere who find themselves in difficult urban circumstances … emigrants, country people, people forced by economic circumstances to endure hardship, intolerance ,racism.  It’s a big song I think and also in its own way it is a love song.
 
8  NOT AS WE KNOW IT
Yes … it is a song about being out of step with the contemporary world.  But don’t take its grumpiness too seriously.  It’s born out of moments like this.  It was the day that George Harrison died.  A colleague of mine at BBC Radio Foyle, mercifully an administrative person not a presenter, said to me,
“That’s them all dead now isn’t it!”
I looked at her and said,
“Yes, I’m afraid so!”
What else could I say? I know Paul has been dead since 1969 but I must have missed Ringo’s passing. So it’s a grumpy middle aged man’s song. The young … they know nothing and they care less.
 
It’s also a song about poetry … how an apt quotation can counterpoint anything you are trying to say perfectly.  I do it myself on occasion and I am really appreciative if somebody I am talking to comes up with a nice quote.  We are talking the finer things of life here but there is little time for those things these days, more’s the pity.
 
Regarding the final verse it gave me a good deal of pleasure to put a line from Yeats and a line from Milton in the same verse.  I was in Sligo town one summer and attended a show at the Hawkswell theatre there.  During the intermission I began to listen to a conversation going on behind me between an American who was attending the Yeats Summer School and a Sligo man. 
 
“We never did that fella Yeats at school … that William Butler Yeats lad,” says the Sligo man, “Was he any good? Would he be as good now as Milton?”
“Well sir,” says the American, “All I can tell you is William Butler Yeats is one of the major poets in … ( at this point I was expecting something on the lines of, “in twentieth century world literature”) … “in the entire Sligo area!”
 
9  LEAVING IT SO
It is a big song, this one.  It is the most personal of the songs on this collection.  There are five big, chunky verses and Eddie O’Donnell who did all the arrangements for the album was worried that the song might become ponderous if it wasn’t arranged with a good deal of care. The key to the success of the arrangement is the rhythm. That sprightly guitar drives it on all the time. It’s an American rootsy fingerstyle that can make a slow song seem quite brisk.  I said to Eddie when we practised the song for the first time “I know that rhythm. It’s Bruce Langhorne backing Bob on Freewheeling”
“Bob who?” says Eddie, “It’s Steve Earle and Del McCoury up on the mountain!”
 
So it’s a biographical song.  It’s about growing up in a place, about memory, about childhood friends who have become strangers now, about putting away childish things but it is also very much about the present too.  I talk to the moon in the song as many songwriters do.  I thought it was only fair though to let the moon have his say as well.  I felt sorry for that pock marked face of his battered by a million knocks but surprisingly he felt equally sorry for our predicament.  But then he has seen a hell of a lot more tragedies on this planet than any of us have.
 
10   MY BROTHER’S TURNED INTO A YANK
“ The Returned Yank” has been a comic figure in Irish literature and yarn spinning for a long time. Whether six weeks or sixty years out in the states back come these Irish boys and girls with Stetson hats perched on their heads, telling tall tales and talking big. In fact you can encounter stories of people here in my home town who worked in the “Yanky Base”(an American Nato communications location), who had never been inAmerica in their lives and had Texas drawls and wore cowboy boots.  I was talking to a man from Larne in County Antrim just the other day.  His favourite song on the album is this one and he told me that the plot of the song exactly fitted someone he knew in his street.
 
When I wrote the tune I knew I needed a light hearted lyric.  At one stage it was me who turned into a Yank but in the end I thought it better to let it happen to my brother.  I should also explain that the Irish expression “Mar Dhea” which occurs in the final verse is largely untranslatable but means in the context
“And he says to my Da in the kitchen Mar Dhea (and my da’s not often in the kitchen)
I hope that is a satisfactory explanation. Now translate it into American!