Sorry about the interminable delay and the cessation of these lyrical posts before Christmas but I think the year just caught up with me. I suppose it is quite fitting that the next song for the treatment is “…Shadows”.

2012 was a pretty wild year emotionally for me and Mickey – we both became fathers and both stopped being grandchildren. As we were especially close to our maternal grandma we really felt this shift of two steps up the generational tree. Parenthood meanwhile has brought with it a new realm of love, trust, pride, gratitude and concern.

This song is intended to be quite personal and lyrically delicate, exploring a relationship with loss – me and my partner will one day have to part in very final terms. One of us will witness the other’s death and have to put together the pieces after this emotional investment suddenly disappears. Trying to imagine this is not possible, but I still get quite strangled thinking about it…. So I thought I’d write a song about it….

Mickey had the most wonderful riff which I wrote a chord progression over. This underpins the song staying in place whilst Mickey’s part drifts in and out… We love playing this song live and me and Matt always make a point of standing next to each other when Mickey’s playing takes hold for the first time. He’s a very bashful player which sometimes belies his musicality so by staring at him intently we get to enjoy his playing and place the visual focus on him…

The final verse deals with the idea of mortality – the sustenance of your being through a memory, through being talked about, through influencing, through a photograph. I have a strange theory that it is thoughts, language and gestures that are the actual living beings – we are just the mechanical host through which they transverse. That’s another song though.

I suppose loss is inevitable, but at least it makes you think and feel – and to feel is to live….

It’s like barbed wire
This crucial touch
That holds me near
Expects so much
No disregard
Will tie me down
I will be waiting
Waiting for ours

In fifty or sixty
She’ll leave me
Completely
And one of us
Will coldly hold
The other’s hand
No metaphor for this
That I can understand
Show me

I’m like barbed wire
This crucial touch
That holds me here
Expects so much
No disregard
No guileless charm
I will be waiting
Waiting for ours

I will be waiting
In the shadows
In the dead of night

So hold me
And sway me
Remember
Me daily
For all that will
Remain of us
Is photographs
No metaphor for this
That I can understand
Show me

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