Comments: 0 | Categories: Song lyrics
Tom was a radical, Helen a Jew They talked long and deeply of all they'd been through Helen said Tom I love you like my hands Let's fly out together and live off the land They learned a new language...
June 25, 2007: The Wind Like Lace on Greenan Shore
Comments: 0 | Categories: Song lyrics
The song emerged from a jam with Gil Murray, a friend I met in Queensferry, who happened to come from Ayr like me, and who also had fond memories of Greenan Shore, just to the south of the town. The...
June 25, 2007: Submarine Girl
Comments: 0 | Categories: Song lyrics
The comma between Submarine and Girl should preserve me from accusations of smut. I started this in the Commonwealth Pool with my son when he was four. On that day and on every instance of my attempting to sing it,...
June 25, 2007: Nicole
Comments: 0 | Categories: Song lyrics
I started inventing this walking along Hanover St. The analyst verse was the first. Originally it had a chorus, which I dropped. People keep asking me who Nicole is. She's a librarian in Partick - so there. I went to...
June 25, 2007: The Ever Open Door
Comments: 0 | Categories: Song lyrics
I wrote this in Leek, Staffordshire, still under the Dylan influence, but never played it. When I came to Edinburgh in 1990 I played it gingerly at a writers' workshop, thinking I'd be savaged for ripping off Dylan. Nobody mentioned...
June 25, 2007: The Ballad of Bob Dylan
Comments: 0 | Categories: Song lyrics
As I've often told it, I was trying on jeans in a shop in Leek, Staffordshire, where I lived at the time, and heard Dylan's Tweeter and the Monkey Man from the newly-released Traveling Wilburys album on the radio. I...
June 25, 2007: New Eyes
Comments: 0 | Categories: Song lyrics
The story varies a little each time I tell it. I guess it's just an elaborate way of saying I took up drawing. It's a sunny day But the sky is grey There's nothing really in the weather I'm still...
May 14, 2007: Call Back Fall Back
Comments: 0 | Categories: Song lyrics
Why don't you call back, fall back on me? There was once a time You didn't seem to mind Asking for me I'd do the best I could That was understood You'd just ask for me The ever open door...
March 27, 2007: (Only) the Sea
Comments: 0 | Categories: Song lyrics
Inspired by the book The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, by Buddhist ideas of impermanence, and by reading the diaries of a friend's sea voyage (NL). Seven days or maybe nine Groundless rumours, heavy wine Foreign words in a foreign...
