I write the songs....
September 2008 I write another song a year and a half later call me prodigious !
Then a couple of weeks later another !
I still don't play them at the open mics they're not very good and well I'm not good at performing in public. It's always been a weak point I go to jelly I've tried, acted in plays, been on the debating team but generally they were disasters I would rather not repeat than stepping stones to some sort of "what" fame that I have never ever sought.
However I did publish them on myspace !
Actually it seemed to have some effect. For instance in the regular weekly open mic I used to go to when I did I should have learned to drive a lady did a song called "drive me round the bend again". Not sure that's particularly flattering but. When I put on facebook this tune I hadn't completed the tasks afterall
There were songs about restoring your hair...There were other examples there was some sort of competing conversation going on amongst groups as well as to me.
It was all …… a …..bit ...weird.
I did at that time write a song called "will someone tell me what the F**** is going on" never played it.
but I felt compelled to go on writing.....
On the left there are a selection of songs in chronological order. I wrote more especially later on but never transferred them onto soundcloud so..
God moves over the face of the earth
Since early October I would be driving around in my van for work and well I would notice the crosses on the church and they seemed oddly compelling. I was resistant at first but I went to a church in Sheffield maybe November. It was mad there were people doing pilates in the aisle. While there an older lady with a very knowing smile gave me a book and recommended I read it she said it had a good ending. It was "The Road" by Cormac Mcarthy.
I think I maybe went two more times but it was largely just to soak up the love that would almost cut through you. It wasn't the love of the congregation or anything like that it was like light coming from above.Make no mistake when god touches you you know its god.
I wrote a song about it.
This night has opened my eyes
So it gets to christmas 2008 the christmas number 1 is "halleluyah" and the world is getting weirder and weirder. What was I thinking , well I was an atheist who had just found god and for some reason he loved me and seemed to be trying to set me up with this girl like some celestial cilla black. If I did all the things including giving up smoking. WEIRD but you know well I'm ok thanks Im not really into forced marriages, Remember I dont believe in angels and devils and all that malarcey I havent really picked up the bible I was recently given, I'm just mat and I would rather the attention went away.
Then...
Early January my very heavily pregnant sister came with me to one of the open mic nights at the broadfield pub. On reflection she was probably checking up on me but anyway this occasion was very memorable for another reason. While I was there it was like weird I could see some people with what looked like halos around them to be fair they were the christians that used to regularly go to the open mic who I half knew although they went to a different church. Others particularly the ones that had been answering my songs if you like had like sub bodies that were shrivelled up inside of them while there were others that were completely ordinary.
So why did this shake me up so much well partly because that night I had a remembered memory of meeting the girl of the songs one of those random times she would pop up at a pub and she made a funny snorting action with her head. At the time I thought it was maybe drugs maybe a nervous action but with my new eyes so to speak something dragon like and snappy had risen out of her when she did that in my memory. (I should point out that I was on zantaz at the time to try and stop smoking one of my tasks if you remember ,zantaz can give you halucinations)
However I had never really paid that much attention to lyrics even my own... but look back on my own lyrics that I had already written some months before hand. Add in the new found fact that angels and demons and devils like existed and well..... HOLY CRAP !!!!!! I thought it was just metaphor. They weren't songs about the end of a relationship they were songs about the end of the world !
Me and my sister used to have a game whereby if there was any situation there was always a song that you could find appropriate.
So are there any songs for being in some sort of metaphysical song battle between good and evil over the end of the world.
Well yes quite a few.
Of course the first thing I did of course this being the modern age is go home and google it.