There’s a category of musician I like to call “Cosmic Plumbers.” Strip away his rock star accoutrements, and someone like Richard Ashcroft is the sort of bloke who’d be sorting your boiler out when he’d drop something approaching quiet wisdom into the conversation over a cuppa that you’d find yourself mulling over for a few days. If they had an acoustic guitar and an orchestra instead of a pipe wrench they’d be dangerous. I suspect there’s a significant number of philosophers trapped in the bodies of tradesmen. I tell you all this apropos of nothing, except it’s the sort of backdrop against which I wrote the lyrics to this relatively noisy track. Have a listen, check the lyrics, and we can convene for a cuppa.
Lyrics
All of the light that you can see
The sun, and the skies, the stars, the sea
Were forged in the fires of history
Everything that you think you own
Are like grains of sand upon a beach
Washed back to the depths from whence they came
An unknown and unknowable end
There’s only you and me who are here
And we’re the sum of a billion years
The words that you’re hearing have already passed
They were the future now they’re past
And nothing that’s made will ever last
The good and the bad, the slow and the fast
There’s only you and me who are here
And we’re the sum of a billion years
If there’s no future then there’s no past
So just let it go
What does it matter to you
Stop chasing ghosts and just go with the flow
The sound of a billion drums
Drowned out by a billion guns
The loss of a billion lives
And the billions they left behind
A billion grains on a beach
A billion souls left unreached
A billion futures to make
A billion hearts yet to break
A billion words to be said
A billion thoughts in your head
A billion years yet to come
A billion songs to be sung
Thoughts
Whew. That was a bit of a cacophony wasn’t it?
I’ve actually wanted to write a song in this vein for a very long time. A couple of songs have come close to this style (such as England’s Bones) but this by far the most deliberate and, I think, successful.
I mentioned Richard Ashcroft in the preamble, but sonically this has splash landed pretty firmly in the Oasis end of the pool. I have mixed feelings about Oasis. There was a time when they were a real rock and roll force, but after What’s the Story they became a sort of self-sustaining parody. I often said that they were the Slade of the 90s: slightly comic and yobbish, and yet capable of landing some absolute monster tunes with genuine emotional resonance. If you’ve got more than one song in the popular conscious twenty years on, I’d say that proves that you’ve got that indefinable “it” that everyone’s searching for.
I’m rambling aren’t I?
The reason I bring Oasis up is that this sprang from a clutch of chords that very much sounded in the classic Oasis vein. Lots of open strings and suspensions (Noel Gallagher was a much cleverer song writer than he is given credit for) which immediately suggested a drone – supplied here by a tanpura, a classical Indian instrument. That’s usually pitched in an odd key to Western ears, a C#, so I whacked a capo on the second fret to save faffing about with the tanpura app.
Next, a loping bassline very much in the classic psychedelic vein. Listening back, I noticed that it was actually slightly flat – but so fractionally that rather than sounding terrible it actually created a sort of slightly phasing effect. Sometimes you’re looking for those little imperfections.
When I started fiddling with electric guitars it began to sound “right.” I don’t know how to explain what that means, but sometimes when you add a part you find that it never sounds right without it. In this case it was the very thick, distorted guitar part – that’s really just power chords chugging along. This was also the moment when it began to get undeniably close to the classic Oasis sound. To whit:
- Open/suspended chords on an acoustic guitar
- Heavy distorted power chords
- Jangled chords with unusual chord voicings – open strings, suspensions, discordance
- Very bottomy bass
- Pompous yet meaningless lyrics in the cosmic plumber mode
At this point I pulled myself up and said “hang on – do I want to make an Oasis record?” and decided that I’d go 50/50 on the deal, as I was enjoying the effect.
So, just to mix it up a bit I threw in an Indian violin part (actually an acoustic guitar figure reversed) and some keyboards. By this point I was deep into creating a full Wall of Sound type effect so figured there was no point applying the brakes. I added a second kind-of guitar solo throughout the second half of the song and some strings and horns over the repeated, mantra style bit towards the end. They’re a bit low in the mix, but (I think) help to make it feel like it builds to a climax.
Finally, I chucked in a triplet feel riff at the end to bring the song to a conclusion.
Of course, you can’t do this kind of song without having an overdriven vocal, which I was more than happy to bellow repeatedly into the mic for an hour while The Missus was watching Her Shite on the telly.
And then… it was done! And this brings me almost to the point where I have a full album’s worth of songs. I’ve a couple of other ideas bubbling in my pot, so I could either do a 10 track album or lengthen it out to 12 tracks. I’m not sure though, because this song is knocking on for 5 minutes, and one of them is over 9 minutes, and I’ve no wish to bore the tits off everyone.
I sense this is a tedious blog post, because I’m writing while the kids keep rapping on the door asking to be entertained. Fuck you, Covid-19.