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Red JohnTrack 1 from Interim ReportsI was told a tale once by a friend who had tried to chat up a girl in a pub in Paisley, Scotland, by asking her if she would like a drink. “Yes”, she replied apparantly, “but you’re not getting anything!” Well there you have it. Such experiences are likely to scar sensitive souls for life. I don’t believe my friend was that type but I would certainly have been seriously injured. Social interaction with girls - especially if I had aspirations - was never my strong suit. In fact, I was so inhibited I rarely even tried. Red John is a song about a naïve youth, Iain Dearg, who has moved to the big city (I had London in mind because it mirrors my own migration) from the remote Highlands of Scotland and who has the bravado and persistance to match his lust but lacks any experience or sophistication to have any hope of accomplishing his goal. I’m sure Iain has made it by now. It’s tweny years since this tale was first told, after all.
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The SpaniardTrack 2 from Interim ReportsI wrote this with my son in mind. It was one of two songs (Red John being the other) that I came up with upon my recovering from depression and picking up the guitar again (after an interregnum of five years) in 1986. The song is a juxtaposition of the pleasure to be gained from a young family and the poignancy with respect to the loss of one’s own youthful bravado and potency. That these two songs should open the CD is purely incidental, but their position there is perhaps apt.
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Blah Blah BluesTrack 3 from Interim ReportsAn unusual song for me in that it speaks of unconfined joy! Hmm… Like most “happy” songs, does it lack a little… er… depth? Nevertheless, it’s unremitting good spirits, were it to have been juxtaposed with, say, a more contemplative “middle-eight”, would might have lent it an air of bipolarity that would have been a slight upon its innocence. I’m satisfied that it at least changes key a couple of times - a fact which brings up a curiosity: this happy-go-lucky tune spends most of its time in the Minor mode which I find strange because I have no difficulty at all in making the Major sound downright suicidal. The chromatic falling harmony in the verse is as common as muck, I know. But hey - it’s my song, so there! By the way (I hear you ask), what’s a “hey-ho-noddy-no”? It’s a term ubiquitously used in English folk songs. I’ve got no idea what it means. And a “diddle-de-dum”? Sorry, don’t know. A “Tickety-boo”? A term meaning “far out, man!”. And finally, what’s a “la-di-da”? Nothing: I was just singing scat vocal as I was writing this bit and I never did find a proper lyric and so the scat stayed and got onto the CD. Well, I hope that helps in increasing the satisfaction you get from the experience of listening to “Blah Blah Blues” (even the title never got finished). At the end of the day, it might be best considered as a vehicle for some fun guitar bits and a chance to let off steam.
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EntropyTrack 4 from Interim ReportsLove and the 2nd Law Of Thermodynamics? Yeah, right. Somebody wrote that the song oscillated between a bluegrass feel and a “Jewish” vibe. That tickled me a bit. I think I can see where he was coming from now, though. So you learn something new every day. The 2nd Law certainly has application to the life of my guitar strings, the shortness of which has cost me a small fortune over the years - which in turn has contributed to the entropy of my bank balance and the atrophy of my abilities to buy more guitars. The last which, I guess, proves the cyclical nature of the Universe since it puts a natural limit on the number of sets of guitar strings for which I can directly be the cause of the further application of the 2nd Law. This all might have been fertile ground for the composition of another verse to the song, but composition about decomposition is not something for which I have any heart.
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