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…