Tuesday 26 May 2009

Searching for a metaphor

This September will be the anniversary of the release in the UK of the EMI version of Entertainment!
Gill & I want to celebrate this and will play 4 concerts , Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leamington Spa And The Forum, London, in which we’ll play the whole of the album. We’ll also play other stuff, so we may play 2 sets. There’ll be a re-released special edition of the album with a bunch of stuff from that time that strangely has only recently emerged , including multi-camera shoots of us onstage in the UK & US when we were cute. I don’t recall any of this having been done, which doesn’t say much, I guess. Seeing this will be a surprise for me, too.
Today, Gill & I are in his studio re-recording “ Glass “ as a bonus track for this special edition. We’re doing this because when we made Entertainment! we weren’t that sure about putting the original on the album, as it was the last survivor of music we’d been writing before we found our own sound. It was a little too this and a little too that. A little too much genre. The irritating skippy snare, like a gerbil on amphetamines, the too literal bass, mooching around like an audition for the Stuka’s , the overly musical guitar - which Wilco would have not approved of- and my lazy lyrics which used way too many metaphors before I’d escaped their tyranny.
Once we’d recorded this, we felt we’d let ourselves down by not pushing the ideas and parked the song for a long while and hardly played it live until we looked at it again , stripped it down and reinvented it. Embraced repetition. Dumped the winge factor. It became, we felt, a fine song . I even grew to like the lyics, especially “ Light myself a cigarette, nicotine really goes to my head” . It did. The eroticism of smoking. I’m pleased we can re-do this, give a tune away in a form that has time to live. There’s a metaphor in there. I just wish I knew what it is.

No comments:

Post a Comment