I know the lyrics for Jennifer have long been up for perusal but it seems remiss to not talk a little about it, whilst also satisfying my urge to work chronologically through the album…

The song is kind of accidentally in 3/4 which is strange as it doesn’t sound like it is, but it tends to just quite laconically follow the riff which we wrote in a rehearsal one day. Instrumentally the song was very easy to demo and then record: me and Mickey tracked everything very roughly in about a day before revisiting later to re-record the bass with Matt (this added plenty of energy to it) and the drums with Greenie. We really like the zip that it had especially the who-be-dab-a-dab-a vocal parts…

The lyrics were a different story, we couldn’t settle on subject matter. Even though I’d nominally sang “Jennifer” when working on an acoustic guitar I really didn’t want to write another song about some fictional woman haha…. It just seemed like a total cop out……BUT with a little gravitas added to the subject matter it just did not work. We couldn’t reconcile this outrageously happy melody with a dour lyric and so ended up with the first lyrics that were written in anguish…. This process took an inordinate amount of time and paper until we stopped trying to make the song something it just wasn’t. I suppose we realised that it is ok to make a song that is just nice and doesn’t try to comment on the state of life, plus the words do collide nicely into each other… OH and it has my first ever guitar solo on it so it can’t be all that bad.

Right, here are the lyrics anyway for the misanthropes amongst you. I’m off to pre-order my souvenirs for the royal baby ahhhhhh?

It’s a shame that
I don’t love you better
Fateful words emblazoned
on your sweater
Made to move him
From a distance
Every line to outline
Your resistance

Jennifer
Why do you
Have to be
So taciturn?

Fortunately
He tries to placate her
Tying notes to
Broken kitchenalia
The way the ink blots
On the sink stops
Him from carving
Thoughts into the work tops

The knots she ties
In almost all her clothes
Are growing greater by the day
Her April showers
Will have soon devoured
The alacrity of May.

It was always
Going to end
Like this…..