I often wish I could sing, but because I cannot, I often don’t feel too happy about the music I create. I generally don’t mind the amateurishness of the production, but the song is so disastrous that I often leave it in the drawer. This song, however, I really like, and I definitely consider it the best I have written so far. It also comes with a somewhat interesting story, but I will return to that below. So here it is – bear with the vocals…
I remember beginning this song when my daughter, Nora, was a couple of months old. As you can imagine, I did not have much time to play the guitar, so I often found myself just strumming a few basic chords, not really playing anything but enjoying holding the instrument, hearing the strings vibrate. This is how I stumbled upon the first lines of the song, and they came to me almost fully formed: the boy who sees a girl sitting somewhere dark, at a station, caching a glimpse of her eyes and instantly knowing that she is special. At this time, Nora began waking up, giving me just enough time to make the quickest of demos on my phone before having to go to find out what was happening now.
It was a few days before I could work on the song again, and I fully expected it to be an easy process, what with the first part coming to me in a matter of minutes. It did not turn out this way – of course, one is tempted to add – and after a long time trying to come up with a second verse, I was about to give up. And then I began just toying with the melody, and thus came the second part.
When I returned to the song some time later, it had already begun changing. I had been listening to Sgt Pepper and now had the idea of taking it in the same direction as ‘She’s Leaving Home’. I envisaged a parent, a father, looking for his daughter, who had run away from home. She is probably a late teenager, definitely not a child anymore. He finds her and recognises that she is miserable and lost, physically and psychologically – and maybe there is even a moment’s clarify as to the blame? But when that apology, long overdue, finally comes, it rings hollow, and there is no healing whatsoever.
In the chorus, I let the parents speak, and they are as pathetic as the parents in ‘She’s Leaving Home’. They do not realise that their daughter is a grown-up, who cannot be bought with sweets and hot chocolate. Later in the song it becomes clear that they do not deserve our pity, which is where they differ from the parents in ‘She’s Leaving Home’, who I believe do deserve some pity. This is made clear when the girl gets her say, and we realise that her love for another girl is behind it all. Her parents, unable to accept her as she is, have, in reality, left her, rather than the other way around. The conflict is echoed in the final parts, where any hope of reconciliation is extinguished.
If only I had the voice to convey all this…