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After
The Darkness
A
bit of wishful thinking, this one, I was definitly needing some of that
Hope in the Dawn. Some of the lyric inspired by the picture on the
front of the old Tate and Lyle's Golden syrup can. There's a lion
lying down with a lamb or something, with the words the bitter shall bring
forhth sweeteness. Rememberance of childhood idylls complete with
Peanut Butter and Syrup sandwiches. When we were recording this
one we were thinking how nice harpsichord would be on it, but we'd
need a REAL keyboard player. It so happened ex-musical parter Julian
Marshall was in New York so he come along to play. We hired him,
but I don't know if he actually ever got paid.
Fallen
Angel
Ooh.
Creepy this one. Kit takes on the persona of angry Lucifer cast
out of Heaven. I shudder to think where I was at! Not one
of my fave vocal performances. In general I was trying to sound
stronger than I think my voice was capable of (force grown, perhaps?)
Roger Daltrey did this one far more justice!
Fire
In His Eyes
The
fairground/circus tratment was inherent in the writing of this song.
The keyboard riff is the first thing I came up with and that inspired
the imagery. We recorded the whole album in New York (which is step
one, I guess, on how I come to live here now!) Yes, that is
Mr. Mike Thorne shouting his head off in the bridge. This never
actually made it onto the album: it was released first as a single which
flopped. As the record company felt we needed another uptempo on
the album, this one was ousted.
Too
Far Too Soon
I'd
just arrived in New York City to start work on the second album with
Mike Thorne. I was staying at his and Leila's place. Alone
one Spring afternoon, I sat at their somewhat honky tonk upright
and wrote this. Straight from the gut. After the Aaron relationship
broke up, I was in Lonesome Limbo Hell for a few confusing and intense
years when all I seemed to manage were the odd one-nighters and/or
unrequiters. This was about one of those. Usually the vocals were
the somewhat painstaking last stage of recording. In this case,
though, we kept the guide vocal that I sang when the band was putting
down the backing track; couldn't improve on it.
Wild
Ones Dance
God
knows where all these shifting time signatures came from. It was
hell for the musicians to play! When I wrote it (another Basement
Song) it all seemed quite natural. I'd recently watched Polansky's Vampires Ball for the umpteenth time and kept imaginging all these
'Wild Ones' rounding the corner and being invisible in the mirror.
While watching from the shadows, I think this is how I was feeling
a lot of that time: self-conscious and outside of life. The wildness
came out in the music.
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