Andrea T from C5 the band, mentioned in passing that she’d had a dream where she wrote a song, but she could only remember the following line – “She said, it’s not my time for the sea”.
Well, having worked with co-founder and erstwhile member of our Arts Night collective Simon Oliver on a song last week (My Light, My Sky), I felt like I was on a roll and came up with some lyrics to hang around Andrea’s phrase. The words evolved over the course of a couple of days with input from Andrea as well as a beautiful additional verse from her.
I then set about pulling together some music using various loops and adding my own bass playing, lead guitar, acoustic intro, and vocals. You can think of the final song as being about an abusive relationship, where humanity is the abuser and Mother Earth is the victim.
It’s definitely a genre fluid song – starts with a pseudoclassical figure on my Taylor acoustic guitar, goes into a proggie-folk section, which builds to me playing some heavy Lifesonesque guitar on an Ibanez electric, then breaks down into a sort of Radiohead meet The Lotus Eaters mid-section before heading into funk-rock with a splash of gospel, leaning into a bit of hip-hop with a nod to Adamski and Seal via Chic and George Benson. My bass part nods knowingly to The Temptations’ song My Girl. Did I already say it was genre fluid?
It’s not our time for the sea
You’ll never know what hit you
You’ll only bear the scars
You’ll never find the peace in you
just staring at the stars
Beyond the pain there’s yearning
to chase away the night
The futile hope of turning
the bending of the light
I’ll tell you what your problem is
You never can concede
Give and take will always fail
when there is wanton greed
You’ve got to find a shelter
in your happy place
It’s not about your pride
it’s not about saving face
We walked through barren fields
We saw the forest fires
We raised up all our wicker men
The silhouetted pyres
We felt the rising of the tide
Our homes we had to flee
She said “The world will always turn
but it’s not my time for the sea”
They say that water always wins
but that’s the nature of the game
The seasons are eliding
yet the land can still reclaim
She said ‘Those scars will heal with time
as dust returns to earth’
The sea remains but still
we chase the hope of our re-birth
Barefoot in the water seems a lesson out of class
Tread carefully now, there may well be a little broken glass
If the pressure’s on the rise, the change could crush our pride
And in the end, my dear, we could always say that we all tried