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The Girl Who Fell In Love With The Moon
“I used to go to Denmark a lot to write songs with my friend Jacob Eriksen because I found that Jacob has a better command of English than any English person I know. He writes songs for Danish cartoons - his songs for one called Help, I'm A Fish did very well. We would write five songs in an afternoon. 'The Girl Who Fell In Love With The Moon' was written as he was walking out the door and I don't think he realised how good it was. At the time I was convinced that the title 'The Girl Who Fell In Love With The Moon' must have been a book or film or something though I'm not sure it is. But it's a song about ladies and their time of the month. I've always been quite interested in that, as a songwriter. I played it to Eddi Reader and she recorded it; it was a single and was also used to accompany the weather report on Japanese TV for about a year and a half. That was nice.”
Weatherman
“I wanted to write the most simple song possible. I thought about my son while I was writing it - it's about how someone else can control your emotions. It uses the first guitar riff that I ever thought of, a riff that also turned into the song 'Joke'. I didn't start playing guitar until I was 18 and when I thought of this riff it was the first time it had occurred to me that you could make up your own riff, and I sat playing it all day long. 'Weatherman' was written with my friend Pascal Gabriel who's from Belgium and came over to be percussionist in Tom Robinson's band when he was 17 and went on to work with people like the Inspiral Carpets, S'Express and New Order. We're so different but we really like the way we come from completely different places. He does it all at the computer, and with fantastic old synths and stuff, and I come along with my acoustic guitar. The song was originally written for a very young singer called Belle from Swindon who has a fantastic voice and came to the session with her mother. Ian Brown was in the studio downstairs and he was their favourite person ever - the mother and the daughter - so there was this awkward moment where he sat in the room while we were writing it. One of the most awkward five minutes of my life. He was very polite but I felt a bit self-conscious. The Belle version was never released - it got rejected for being too poppy. To be rejected by a 14-year-old for being too poppy, that's quite an achievement.”
Ontario
“It's like a folk song, really. I've only written about three folk songs ever - it's not really my sort of thing, but if you can pull it off it's nice. There's another song I wrote for Eddi called 'Follow My Tears' that I now hear people singing in folk clubs. Eddi's also going to put this on her new record. Again, it's really simple. I really like the tune which a guy called John McCusker who plays with Kate Rusby helped me with. It's not recorded as a folk song though. We got a really tiny old Casio keyboard - you can sample yourself on it - and funny old eighties drum machines. Where the idea for the song came from was I was in a shop in America and I picked up a lump of amethyst. On the bottom it said it was from Thunder Bay, Ontario. It was quite bulky so I didn't buy it, I just wrote it in my notebook. I wanted to write a song about two people being geographically apart.”
Butterfly (On A Pin)
“This group called Hepburn asked me to come and write songs for them. They had this big wooden Danish house in the middle of this village in Cambridgeshire where the group, three young women, lived. It was like the Monkees. Very strange. They had a couple of hits; 'Bugs' was the one I wrote. That was my first foray into the pop thing. Often when you write pop songs, you're asked to knock all the interesting bits off by the pop censors - the one line I like, that's always the one I get the phone call about saying, 'Can you change that line?'. But the people who were running this project were really open to good songs. There's a song on Hepburn's album that I didn't write called 'Here Comes Napoleon' which is a fantastic song. When I was working with them I would make something up in my room in the morning and play it to them and see if they liked it. With 'Butterfly…' I played it to the singer, who was called Jamie, and I went 'do you like it?' and obviously I wasn't meant to ask her because she looked panic-stricken. It's about how, sometimes, older men get younger girlfriends and keep them away from the world. Take away all their fun. Like cinemas on Saturday. I thought it was a good thing for young girls to sing about. Their version of this was a bit polite but it's quite an angsty song.”
Sugar On The Pill
“There was a really lovely period when Eddi lived in London; where I'd go down to her house in Clapham, and we'd just sit around discussing things and it seemed very effortless, and it was guaranteed at the end of the day that I'd come out with something I really really liked. We ended with about fifty songs. This song was a b-side for her from around the time we did an album called Simple Soul in her drummer's front room on a seven-track. The eighth track didn't work. A lot of the process of doing this record was listening to things that I hadn't heard for a long time. When I was listening to some of my older songs they seemed incredibly complicated but, again, this is incredibly simple. I like the line 'whoops, there goes another day', and the fact that it doesn't rhyme properly. It's about people splitting up and trying to make it as pleasant as possible.”
Slow Learner
“I tried three times to go to Nashville to write songs. I'm not very good at it. You have to go to these little offices down Music Row - they all look like houses and they all have writing rooms at the top, with a piano or just a table. You have appointments, normally two hours. You arrive at reception, meet who you're going to write with for the first time, and then go upstairs and try to write and song. I quite like the challenge of that, but it's such a cold environment and I didn't really come up with anything I liked at all. But I met some incredible people while I was there. The taxi driver who used to pick me up and take me places, Jack Tombs, said he used to write songs and I looked him up in a book and he'd had loads of huge hits. And then I met this guy, Tom Littlefield. We had a drink and he invited me back to his house to write a song - he explained that the house was empty because his wife was away for the weekend - and we came up with 'Slow Learner'. Because I was in Nashville I was just trying to do a song about I keep getting my heart broke but I keep going back for more. I knew that in that environment I couldn't get flowery. The line we liked was 'my heart bends, it just won't seem to break'. There was another guy there who was a songwriter and I asked him, 'What's the most important thing you've discovered writing songs?' and he said, 'The longer you hold a chord, the bigger it sounds when you change'. And that's the best thing I ever heard. It changed the way I wrote. My favourite cover I've ever had was the version of 'Slow Learner' about two years afterwards by the Nashville Bluegrass Band who'd heard Tom Littlefield singing it in a club - very very fast, very bluegrass and completely unlike mine. I'd forgotten about the song until that version arrived. And we forgot about it again while we were recording the album. After we'd finished the rest of the album, I went to Calum's house - the brother of Neil MacColl who produced it all - and we recorded it there.”
Sing To Me
“I wrote this with my friend Rosalie Deighton, whose album I produced, and with Jo Youle who is the group called Scarlet. Scarlet were three teenagers from Hull whose first album I put out on my label, Haven; they arrived at the audition with their keyboard on a shopping trolley. 'Sing To Me' isn't the sort of song I normally write at all - it's very anthemic. Recently I played in Scotland accompanied by a band I produced, Wild Strawberry, and when we played this song it sounded like the biggest song of all time. The audience were so excited they made us play it again immediately afterwards. It's also the first time I've ever drummed on a record which is why the drums are so quiet.”
Patience Of Angels
“I wasn't sure about doing this here so we first tried it in a very obscure way with harmoniums and singing through funny things, but eventually we re-recorded it very much like my original demo. As soon as I relaxed, it was fine. I haven't had many hits, but when you make up a song and it's a hit you actually feel something quite physical. I used to live above a butcher's shop in Cambridge - quite horrible; you'd be woken up every morning by the sound of animals being chopped up - and my daughter Holly was very young, and I was looking out of the window of my flat when a bus came past and somebody waved at me from the bus. We were at the same height. And the song just popped out. It's really about how difficult it must be if you're a single mother. I was still in The Bible at the time and I said it them 'I think I've written our hit' and played it to them, and they didn't like it. But Neil quite liked it, and he ended up playing with Eddi after The Bible split up and taught it to her, and she sung it on a TV programme called No Stillettos. She then got a record deal and was flown to America with Mark Nevin whohad been in Fairground Attraction with her. But they fell out in the studio and he withdrew the main songs for her record; she was in a studio in America with musicians but no songs. So she rang me up and asked if I had a tape of 'Patience Of Angels'. I said I didn't so she said, 'Can you sing it down the phone to me?' I did, and the next day she rang up and played her version to me and asked if I had any more songs. I stood there in my underpants singing 'Joke' down the phone to her and when I looked over the postman was looking through the window at me. Five or six songs I sang down the phone to her that way. It was brilliant - 'Patience of Angels' was a hit and her album did incredibly well and she won a Brit and I was nominated for an Ivor Novello award - all from singing in your underpants down the phone. Quite life-changing, really. I still work with Eddi - we've done seven albums together, we go all over the world. And her last album, an album of Robert Burns songs which I produced, is probably the piece of work that I'm most proud of. So in the end I became determined that 'Patience Of Angels” should go on this album, because it changed my life.”
Submarines
“This was a song I wrote for Alison Clark, Gary Clark's wife, who's a fantastic singer. This wasn't on my short list of songs for this album but Neil reminded me of it one day when we were driving to the studio. I'm not very good at archiving and it made me think that there may be lots of really good songs I've lost, because I would have lost this one if Neil hadn't mentioned it. I couldn't even remember how it went. I was shocked when I heard how it changes key in the middle of the verse and then goes back, but I really like it. This is a more complicated song, but I like the bit about God coming back with an explanation of what it all means and leaving it in a cab. It sounds quite eighties, I suppose, but that's alright - I was around then. Normally my records are really acoustic and pure but for this album I really fancied playing around. I like the bit at the end where Hafdis from Gusgus is doing opera singing. This song also uses a synthesiser called a Korg MS10 which I used to have and love - the band I was in at the time made me throw it away because they'd got a DX7. I regretted it the moment I threw it into the skip. The song is kind of about those engaging little doubts that you have when things are going really well. When I'm very happy I'm suddenly aware that disaster is potentially around the corner, and that's what submarines are.”
Nameless
“This was another Eddi b-side, written on the same day as 'Sugar On The Pill'. It's about all those different things that don't have names. 'Right before you hear a train' is one of my favourite lines I've written. Eddi's version is very different to this - this is about the most rock I get. It was good fun watching Neil going bonkers on the guitar. I'm drumming on it as well, which probably isn't wise. We used a sample of Eddi's original recording which meant that I had to, via my publisher, give approval to myself for using it. I thought about saying no.”
Mountains
“There's this brilliant American band called Swan Dive - they're based in Nashville but I actually met them in Japan. One of them, Bill DeMain, also writes in Mojo magazine and places like that. He said he'd like to write some songs with me, and though we have written in the same room what we started to do is this: he emails me some words, I turn them into a song, changing them around, and send it back to him. His lyrics aren't like mine at all, but it's just one of the most enjoyable songwriting exercises I ever get to do. We've written quite a few songs but my favourite is 'Mountains'. They recorded it two albums ago, on their album June. I only realised after we'd recorded our version that the tune's a bit like 'Walk Away Renee', though it does change. Neil spent forever sampling a child's music box, and that's the sound at the beginning. We also used an old drum machine - all the sort of things I don't normally do.”
I Felt Her Soul Move Through Me
“Quite sad, this. I was flying to Aberdeen to do a gig with Eddi in a bookstore and there was a message from my sister saying that my mum was dying, so I had to go straight back home. About ten days later, after the funeral, we'd rescheduled the concert and went to Scotland again, and Eddi's dad died. I wouldn't have thought of writing a song about that, but she wanted to sing about it, and I wrote this. It's an unusually personal one, but one that she could sing as well, without it being mawkish or anything. About my mum and her dad. When she sings it, it's called 'I Felt A Soul Move Through Me'. I wanted to say three things. I've always really loved songs in threes. Neil's dad wrote 'First Time Ever I Saw Your Face', for instance, and that's just three things, and I find that the most beautiful shape. So it starts with when I'm a kid, and then when I moved away, and then... The tune was written by Graham Henderson. He'd given it to me a while before and I'd been singing it to myself, and it seemed to fit. I only recently noticed that it's ever so slightly like 'I'm A Lumberjack, I'm OK', but I also know mum would have thought that was just priceless. My dad came to my last gig and I'd never told him what it was about, but afterwards he said 'thank you'. It's abnormally personal for me, but I really wanted it to go on this album. This version was recorded outside because Neil was busy and I suddenly wanted to record it. The only way we could stop the wind blowing on the microphone was if I sung it in a bush. I think that's my favourite bit of singing I've ever done on a record.”
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