Author: David Bradley

Having collaborated with two of my very good, musical friends this month on two distinct songs, I assumed that would be the end of my musical inspiration, at least until 2024. But, then I was on Threads, and happened upon the account of singer-songwriter janapochop.

Cut to the chase, here’s my new song – Like a flame to a moth. It’s NOT about moths…

In the spirit of finding new music, I checked out her Spotify and there are some wondrous songs to be heard. In particular one called Pretty Please. Jana describes this, her latest song, as having been “produced by me in my bedroom in Brooklyn…but I tried to make it sound like the New Mexico desert night sky.” It is wonderfully evocative and having visited New York and New Mexico a long time ago it struck a chord.

It also struck something else and made me think that I hadn’t tried to write that kind of imagery in a song for a long time. So, I sat down and let the lyrics flow. I then thought about grabbing a guitar and doing my usual singer-songwriter type approach to coming up with the chords and a melody, but nothing felt right. So, I turned to my music software and grabbed a few built-in loops, some harp, some strings, a few beats, and pulled a song structure together with the intention if ad libbing the lyrics over the top of it and then recording live instruments to fit after the fact.

Well, the loops were nice enough and the lyrics evolved, a melody came forth. I pulled a weird middle section together with live guitar and bass. Somehow, this spilled into the following loop section and nudged me to restructure the lyrics and to create something of a refrain. Fun AND games.

Needless to say once I had a demo, I re-recorded the vocals, added some harmonies, pulled together a proper guitar track, added a solo, did a fairly heavy and funky bassline to fit and then mixed it down. A couple of days later I was extending the refrain, adding a little more vocal and mixing it down to the song that’s on my BandCamp page right now. As with most of my songs, it’s genre fluid, starts off a little proggie, builds to a power ballad thing, breaks to some funk rock and then goes full-on crossover for the finale. I suppose bottom line, it’s like Peter Gabriel was doing Big Time while he was still with Genesis in 1973…ish…

Anyway, Jana had a listen, which pleased me no end, and had this to say:

“HOLY this is AWESOME!! This is a whole journey and it’s already stuck in my head – glad to have maybe sparked this but you created a whole world here!!”

…which pleased me no end again.

Long-time collaborator Andrea T had this to say about the song:

“It sounds fantastic – I especially like the chorus, with that driving rhythm and the way it all builds around the swirling arpeggios. The kind of ‘spare’ quality of your voice is quite Peter Gabriel adjacent, and the timbre of some specific words in this one, especially ‘firedoor’, ‘heartbeat’, and ‘blame’… quite uncanny. Actually, think it’s one of the best things you’ve done!”

Like a flame to a moth

Someone’s running up the stair
Brushing metal, stepping hard
The trembling painted banister
The firedoor, insanely barred

There’s no smoking in the kitchen
But, the fire’s out of control
The flames they flickered with your heartbeat
The smoke it lingered in your soul

Like a moth to a flame
Like a flame to a moth
You’re finding its caress
Feeds the burning of the cloth

Like a flame to a moth
Like a moth to a flame
You’re hiding your distress
in the playing of the game

Like a moth to a flame
Like a flame to a moth
It’s knowing your success
Is someone else’s loss

Like a flame to a moth
Like a moth to a flame
It’s the ticking of the clock
The acceptance of blame

There’s a light on in the hallway
Its wires they go deep underground
It’s pulsing to the time of your heartbeat
Yet it didn’t make a sound

Here’s the link to the song again – Like a flame to a moth

Just packaging up six of my most recent songs and musical collaborations that cross over some diverse styles. I’m releasing them as a maxi-EP or a mini-LP, depending on whether you’re glass half-full or half-empty, under the title Genre Fluid for the bargain-bin price of $5 or a dollar each if you want each song separately.

It’s Not Our Time for the Sea is the most recent of the collection with lyrics by Andrea Thomson (from C5 the band) and me. It’s about the abusive relationship between man and Mother Earth, a mish-mash of prog, pop, funk, rock and dare I say it hip-hop and gospel.

My Light, My Sky is about displaced friendships with lyrics by yours truly and Simon Oliver, whom you may know from Clive-upon-Sea’s Fragments album, which was produced by yours truly. This song is a largely percussion-free acoustic singer-songwriter tune, a bit of a Floydian slip if you ask me with some pedal steel guitar suggested by long-time Sciencebase online friend Steelfolk, aka Dr Keith Walker.

Ticking Clocks kicks off like a prog rock song but flips into lounge lizard jazz with Adam Stewart from C5 the Band on drums and synth. It’s lyrically a kind of sequel to She’s Leaving Home.

Take the Waters was inspired by a conversation with Rachel another member of our choir The TyrannoChorus. The track is another singer-songwriter thing with pseudo-choral harmonies, maybe next time I’ll bring the choir together for my songs.

Old Nick is Quick is an uptempo punky little number about getting away with it, or not, as the case may be.

Festival Friends are Cool as Folk is a fingerstyle guitar instrumental improvised after I took part in a guitar workshop with Nigel Wearne.

Here’s that link again – Genre Fluid, the max-EP, or mini-LP.

Andrea T from C5 the band, mentioned in passing that she’d had a dream where she wrote a song, but she could only remember the following line – “She said, it’s not my time for the sea”.

Well, having worked with co-founder and erstwhile member of our Arts Night collective Simon Oliver on a song last week (My Light, My Sky), I felt like I was on a roll and came up with some lyrics to hang around Andrea’s phrase. The words evolved over the course of a couple of days with input from Andrea as well as a beautiful additional verse from her.

I then set about pulling together some music using various loops and adding my own bass playing, lead guitar, acoustic intro, and vocals. You can think of the final song as being about an abusive relationship, where humanity is the abuser and Mother Earth is the victim.

It’s definitely a genre fluid song – starts with a pseudoclassical figure on my Taylor acoustic guitar, goes into a proggie-folk section, which builds to me playing some heavy Lifesonesque guitar on an Ibanez electric, then breaks down into a sort of Radiohead meet The Lotus Eaters mid-section before heading into funk-rock with a splash of gospel, leaning into a bit of hip-hop with a nod to Adamski and Seal via Chic and George Benson. My bass part nods knowingly to The Temptations’ song My Girl. Did I already say it was genre fluid?

It’s not our time for the sea

You’ll never know what hit you
You’ll only bear the scars
You’ll never find the peace in you
just staring at the stars

Beyond the pain there’s yearning
to chase away the night
The futile hope of turning
the bending of the light

I’ll tell you what your problem is
You never can concede
Give and take will always fail
when there is wanton greed

You’ve got to find a shelter
in your happy place
It’s not about your pride
it’s not about saving face

We walked through barren fields
We saw the forest fires
We raised up all our wicker men
The silhouetted pyres

We felt the rising of the tide
Our homes we had to flee
She said “The world will always turn
but it’s not my time for the sea”

They say that water always wins
but that’s the nature of the game
The seasons are eliding
yet the land can still reclaim
She said ‘Those scars will heal with time
as dust returns to earth’
The sea remains but still
we chase the hope of our re-birth

Barefoot in the water seems a lesson out of class
Tread carefully now, there may well be a little broken glass
If the pressure’s on the rise, the change could crush our pride
And in the end, my dear, we could always say that we all tried

TL:DR – Latest song from David Bradley out now on BandCamp, original lyrical inspiration from Clive-upon-Sea: My Light, My Sky.

I’ve worked with Simon Oliver (Clive-upon-Sea) on various musical collaborations since April 2012. At that time, we set up what we hoped (in retrospect) would be a Bowie-style Arts Night. It was very successful with a lot of people passing through the doors over the years.

One of the concepts was to pick a discussion topic and write a song or a poem, or create an image for the next session. We wrote a lot of songs in the first few years. Eventually, we played a few gigs, I produced and played on Simon’s album, Fragments, (available on CD and from BandCamp). It was also the Arts Night that brought together the wonderful and talented people with whom I formed C5 the band.

One thing that Simon/Clive and I had never done was to write a song together. I’ve been struggling to find lyrical inspiration this year, although I did release a 4-track EP earlier in the year. I’ve been pestering Simon for years to offer me some lyrics. He having left the area and thus the Arts Night during the first year of covid, Simon felt it was time to say something lyrically about separated friends.

“I deliberately wrote you something about the sea because half your songs seem to reference it!” he told me, adding “And I wanted to do something that was yours rather than shoehorn my own lyrics into your headspace.”

If that was Simon’s intention, then the lyrics I added were kind of a riposte as a lot of his own songs are about faith and relationships and I wanted to add some of that to the mix, as it were.

The untitled song struck a chord. It’s too easy to watch the years roll by and grieve for friendships, relationships, lost faith…I typed up his lyrics and added a few words of my own. Strung some chords together on guitar and recorded a very rough-and-ready demo. I gave it the title My Light.

I then set about recording it properly. One thing I often struggle with is creating a song without singing and playing guitar to lay down what they call a 1+1. This means the vocal and guitar track are all in the same sound file and cannot be manipulated individually. Thankfully, there’s an AI tool that lets you separate a vocal from other instruments, they used something similar for that “new” John Lennon song that’s been in the news. So once I had a solid demo, I used the AI to tease apart my voice from my guitar. I could then treat the guitar sound to make it brighter and if I’d wanted to, the same with the vocal. In the end, I re-recorded the vocal completely because the lyrics had matured as time went on.

I added some harmonies and did a rough mix. Then added some synth strings and piano to give it more texture. The closing section would lend itself to a full gospel choir, but I don’t have one to hand at the moment, so I just overdubbed my voice, a couple of times, added some handclaps and some finger clicks and a kick and snare.

You can probably hear some clicking in the opening of the song, computer keyboard sounds as I set up my sound-recording software, a familiar and ever-present noise in the pre-edited music files from endless recording sessions. I thought I’d leave them in at this point in the song as an aural reminiscence of our recording sessions. [UPDATE: I’ve muted those noises in the latest version of the “final” mix.]

There are a few other proggie bits in this song. A little SOS-type figure that plays over the guitar solo is something that countless songs from Bowie to Glen Campbell to The Supremes used and I’ve written about morse code in music before. It seemed apt to use it here given the theme of the sea and emotional rescue. The guitar solo itself is a little pastiche of the bass riff from the second half of Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain. Simon has always said that he wouldn’t come to see C5 the band live until we add The Chain to our repertoire. We’ve not risked it live yet. There’s also some reverse-reverb on my vocal for opening bar of one of the choruses, which music tech heads might recognise from various songs such as Rush’s Hyperspace (Part ii of Natural Science) and White Buffalo by Crown Lands.

There’s a little reminiscence of the song I do like to be beside the seaside, which is a personal feeling, having been brought up on the coast, I found myself landlocked thereafter while townie Simon has ended up living near the coast.

Once the pseudo-gospel concludes, there’s a little spoof of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. It’s a joke between us that he was too crazy to be in C5 the band, it’s not true, but it’s an interesting allusion. At the end of that, I whisper “Hello Syd” and you then hear Simon say “Okay, let’s do this!” which was a snippet I pulled from one of the recording sessions we did earlier in the year for his new mini-LP.

The lyrics have evolved as I’ve worked on the song. I’d say Verse 1 is pretty much as he wrote it. It seems to be about friends separated by circumstances and the sea. I added Verse 2 to allude to feelings of grief and how difficult it can be to allow oneself permission to grieve, especially for anyone whose spiritual faith has been rocked. I added Verse 3 to allude to the impact of change on a relationship. Verse 4 then gives the song some kind of resolution, with acceptance and release, and the friend/brother saving the protagonist. You can think of it as saviour or simply a brotherly friend, as in Bobby Scott and Bob Russell sense of the word, He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother. I was also perhaps picturing St Christopher walking through the waves, carrying a child.

Chords

Verses: FM7/A – CM11 – E7s4 – A

Pre-chorus: Em – A – FM7/A – Em11 – A

Chorus: A – FM7/A – Em – A

Coda: Em – A

Simon’s original finale talked of a beautiful sky, a beautiful light. And brings the seemingly resolved song back down to earth, suggesting that although there is support and friendship, ultimately there are things that cannot be reconciled. Usually, a gospel ending in a pop song, think Blur’s Tender or Elbow’s One Day Like This, will be an uplifting finale. While the end of our song sounds uplifting, the lyrics do perhaps tell another tale.

Simon has also built his own version of the song and when he next visits, we will record it from scratch with him on guitar and vocals…

I have lots of songs that have been with me for many, many years. Rush songs, Beatles stuff, Bacharach and David covers, Bowie, Queen, Chic, and on and on. But, three songs written and recorded in the late 70s and one in the mid-80s are not only close to my heart, but feel like they are related. Hashtag: #BeachAngst

The first is Message in a Bottle by The Police. This song hangs on Andy Summer’s arpeggiated riff, which goes from a C#min9 to an Amaj9, B7, and finishes with an F#m. It’s a fairly standard chord progression, although Andy Summers plays it with an interesting, wide inversion of each chord, which I discussed in my Classic Chords series some time ago. Incidentally, the opening C#min9 is equivalent to a C#sus2. The D# note being the 2nd and not in the C# major scale and the ninth in C# minor.

The second song is Martha and the Muffins’ Echo Beach. This tune also hangs on an arpeggiated guitar riff Am-D-C, Am D-Em. It doesn’t really sound like Message in a Bottle, but it shares an edgy guitar tone and the arpeggiation.

The third song is part i of a bigger opus, the Tide Pools movement from Rush’s Natural Science. Once the strummy acoustic of the intro has ended, an arpeggiated guitar riff builds to an edgy tone – Em-C(add9)-D-G-C(add9). This riff does resemble the Echo Beach riff, albeit in a different key. Both written and recorded around about the same time by two Canadian bands. However, if we simplify the chords and put this riff and The Police riff in the same key there’s a more obvious overlap, especially as C-major is the harmonic counterpart of A-minor:

Tide Pools – Em C D C
Message –      Em C D Am

Then, if we simplify the riffs from Echo Beach and Drive, She said and put them in E-minor too, we get this.

Echo – Em A G
Drive – A G Em

The fourth song is Drive, She Said by Stan Ridgway. The arpeggiated guitar of this song is like a desiccated version of Message in a Bottle splashed with Permanent Waves on Echo Beach watched over by Kim Carnes’ Bette Davis eyes. Bette Davis substitutes snow for sand. Meanwhile, chords from Bette Davis Eyes hanker after the Rush’s permanent waves and The Police’s lonely desert island.

Eyes – C Em D

Now, many years later, I suddenly had a revelation. All of these songs are angst-ridden and all of them allude one way or another to beaches, the coast, a rocky shoreline…have I really taken this long to spot that figurative connection. So, it begs the question what led all of those disparate songwriters back in 1979 to hang their song on an edgy arpeggiated guitar riff and sing about longing, with the beach as allegory?

The marine connection is obvious in Message in a Bottle – a guy stranded on the desert island that is loneliness sending out an SOS. Martha hankering nostalgically for the far away escape that is Echo Beach. Rush worrying about our little lives in the Tide Pools, ignoring the big changes, the science and nature, the permanent waves. But, what about Drive, She said? That’s about a taxi driver being coerced into being a getaway driver. But, yes, in his fear-infused imagination, he pictures an alternative reality with his gun-toting, bank-robbing passenger:

“I thought I saw the both of us on some kinda tropical island someplace
Walkin’ down a white sandy beach”

See? Angst and beaches!

Incidentally, I recorded a solo cover of Message in a Bottle many years ago, we perform Echo Beach with my band C5, but we’re yet to include any Rush in our cover songs repertoire. That said, we do Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing, which is basically a musical clone of Rush’s The Spirit of Radio. I might see if the others in the band fancy doing a mashup of Stan Ridgway and Kim Carnes.

Footnote

Having shared my thoughts on social media, I started getting other examples of other angsty, beach songs, although they don’t necessarily have a compact guitar figure:

From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea by The Cure – from Robin McCarthy

All for Leyna by Billy Joel – from Kevin Sargent

Staring at the Sea by The Cure – from Andrea Thomson

On the Beach by Neil Young – from Andrea Thomson

Godrevy Point, Wind in the Wires by Patrick Wolf – from Andrea Thomson