Caroline Says

After the release in 2020 of Jupiter’s Wife, I decided to take a break from writing songs to focus on writing instrumental music. After six solo albums I felt like I needed to give that part of my brain a rest, to let that particular field go to fallow. There was one exception, during one of the lockdowns I wrote ten songs with and for Les Keye - one song per day for ten days. I was curious and quite nervous to see if I could knock out anything worthwhile in a very limited time. There are songs on She Darks Me and The Easter Vigil that took a year to write. On Jupiter’s Wife, “Staying Together for the Children,” came relatively quickly - a couple of months, but I worked on “Hilton & Michael,” on and off, for five years. So it was lovely to see these little gems coming day after day, based on Les’s family history. Eight of these songs appear on Les’s new album 20 Greenlea Road, which I also produced. You can find it it here.

There is a danger for songwriters, that as they become better at their craft and move away from the more intuitive and haphazard method of how they wrote their early songs, they can become intoxicated by form, by the beauty of language and the power of words to rearrange the world and say things in new and exciting ways. It’s what John Banville describes as language being coercive - it wants to speak. I’ve experienced it myself - I have no memory of writing certain songs (which has been a bit awkward in interviews.)  Maybe you move too far towards the head and too far from the heart. The problem is that sometimes you can find yourself so hypnotised by the language that ultimately, beneath the words there is, if not a void then at least a slight feeling of disconnection. It happens to the best  - Dylan, Nick Cave and so on. You become disconnected from the thing that drives you. Disconnected from the listener too. The hope is that you can pass through into another sphere of pure simplicity of language. Saying meaningful things directly with fewer and simpler words. Many songwriters (I include myself - I also remember Suzanne Vega talking about it) cite hearing Lou Reed’s “Caroline Says II,” as a kind of epiphany. 

The line - 

“Caroline says, as she gets up from the floor,

You can hit me all you want to, but I don’t love you anymore,”

 - in a four minute rock and roll song is a kind of gold standard, showing just how much you can say in a single couplet. There are no fireworks here, on the surface it looks (and sounds) so simple, but it takes a great master (perhaps the greatest) to evoke what could be the entire plot of a film, a lifetime of experience, in just twenty-two words. Reed’s “Rock Minuet", is a novel in thirty-two lines - as he said himself, “Some people will understand it. Other people will be actively upset by it.” 

I’ve spent the last while mixing the new a lazarus soul record. I think it’s probably unusual, if not unheard of, that when Brian is recording his vocals, I’m usually standing beside him. Several times during the making of this record, he turned around at the end of a take and we burst out laughing together as he saw my eyes were full of tears. As I’ve spent countless hours working on this music, I’ve at times found myself laughing out loud, at other times there have been tear stains on the recording console. There is such power and simplicity in the lyrics to these songs, in the way that he can tell stories, with fully fleshed-out characters, running the whole gamut of human experience in three short minutes. At times, a couplet like the one above will come out of nowhere and punch you in the stomach. To me Brian Brannigan is an Irish Lou Reed. Those who know me will know, I can’t give any higher praise than that. 

Something else that struck me while mixing this record is that Julie’s drums, Anton’s bass and my guitar seem (without anyone ever really trying) to be inextricably linked, codependent even, or symbiotic in that you can’t really mess with any one element without the whole thing collapsing inwards, losing the thing that makes it work. It can’t be tampered or toyed with. Move a fader here and something happens over there. Nobody sat down and worked this out, and it’s nothing anyone can take credit for, it’s just a weird thing that seems to have happened! But I’ve worked on a lot of records and it is something that is sadly rare. Technology has exerted such a stranglehold, not just on the recording process, but on how music is created and performed, that you almost never encounter a band these days that has some mysterious force of black magic, something way off the grid holding everything together by the thinnest of threads. It’s a fragile and beautiful thing.

More next month…