Songs and memories
For most people, songs have the power to evoke memories. They take us back to the times and places where we first heard them — or to the relationships that were important when we were listening to them. Tom Robinson’s ‘The Collection 1977-87’ and Del Amitri’s ‘Waking Hours’ were the two cassettes that I played on a loop in my first car… a yellow Morris Marina estate that I bought for £100 and which lasted about one month… Still, any of the songs from those two albums can be relied upon to take me right back into the driving seat and onto the M4 from Reading to London and back.
For people who write songs, memories are often a rich source of material. And song-writing can be a powerful and sometimes liberating way of processing memories (old and new); sometimes that’s just about expressing feelings, and sometimes it is about producing a narrative that can hold memories and experiences in a certain way. The two songs I’ve already blogged about — Watershed and Shoemaker’s Son — are examples of those two processes. Watershed doesn’t really have a narrative; but its few words still hold a lot of emotion — I poured a lot of grief into it. Shoemaker’s Son, by contrast, puts my family history into a very clear, chronological narrative structure; it says something about each generation; and it says something about me. It tells the story of where and who I came from in the way that I want it to be understood.
In the ‘Talent is Timeless’ online community, someone suggested that we all should #GAOSSNL: Give an Old Song Some New Love. I liked that idea, so I dusted off the song that I consider to be my first (in the sense that it was the first song I wrote that I recognised as a song), written in 2014. I hadn’t played the song for a few years so I set to work renewing it.
And, of course, it’s a song about a particular memory. When I first started trying to write songs, someone advised me to mine memories and to try to pick out sensory details that might intrigue and engage the listener. Somehow, by being very specific about our own unique experiences, we invite people to connect with them; in so many songs the particular and the universal are in a strange and dynamic relationship.
The memory I built the song around was a happy one. When I was seven (in 1975), our family packed into the back of the camper van my dad had fitted out a few years before, and we headed off to the spectacularly beautiful island of Barra, which sits at the southern tip of the Outer Hebrides. There is nothing between Barra and America except the now uninhabited island of St Kilda (which has itself inspired a song or two…). For three weeks, we wild-camped above Traigh Eais (I think that translates as West Bay or Beach) — a two-mile long stretch of perfect white sand. In my memory at least, the sun shone constantly and we had the place completely to ourselves. It felt like paradise on earth.
My first attempt to channel these memories was in poetry rather than song. Fixing on those particular details, I called the poem ‘Orange Canvass, Green Melamine’:
We travelled to the edge of the world
In a van as white as the sun that shone, fierce and generous
We were three weeks above the dunes, beneath the stars
The long sands of Traigh Eais were our deserted kingdom
The driftwood and detritus our tools and trinkets
Our shoe-free feet ran from shore to steep, from stir to sleep
Our salt-sand hair, bleached blond on limb and neck and head
Marked us our own heroes; castaway survivors
Stationed on the beach grass parapets of our shifting castles
We looked to America but courted no rescue
Raiding our mobile larder, we ate from green melamine bowls
Bread and cereals sickly and sticky with condensed milk
Tins of everything with ladles of smash
The sweetness of the instant whip, delighting the angels
And when we wearied, loaded by the lightness of our joy
We crawled into our stitched up sheets, laid out under orange canvass
Wriggling like earthworms, burrowing into sleep
And dreaming of abandon and adventure
But courting no rescue
I don’t know whether the particular-universal thing is working for you as you read this, but I’m hoping that maybe one or more of those very specific references — or perhaps the atmosphere that the words try to conjure— takes you back to some happy childhood memory of your own?
The poem became the source for the lyrics. That’s a way of writing that I’ve used a few times since. Sometimes it can be good to write free of the structures that song-forms impose, even if at a later stage the words are re-ordered into those same structures. Here’s how the lyrics turned out:
Lyrics
We rode out to the world’s edge
In a van as white as sun
For three long weeks above the dunes
We were free to run and run
On the long sands of Traigh Eais
The driftwood fuelled our play
The beach grasses were the parapets
Of the castles that we made
We were castaway heroes
On an island lost at sea
Bleached blond and shoe-less
With no fear for what might be
With no fear for what might be
We sought no rescue from our respite
We asked no one to save our souls
Only the hourglass was our enemy
The sand was slipping through the hole
And when we all grew weary
From carrying a load so light
We burrowed deep like earthworms
And dreamed our way through night
We were castaway heroes…
Whether in the poem or the lyric form, there is an obvious and nostalgic sentimentality at play here, and (unconsciously, I think) that is reflected in the music. It is gentle, and maybe you can hear the rhythm of the imaginary waves lapping at the shore in the background. Because it all seems so romantic, in the renewed version, I decided to turn it into a waltz. For those of you who know your Scottish country dancing, I can imagine dancing a St Bernard’s Waltz to this tune, maybe one day, on Barra itself. Here’s hoping anyway.
Song links
Here’s a link to the renewed version of the song on YouTube: https://youtu.be/NnNLJE8fwiA
And here’s a link to the earlier version, recorded back in 2014 with the help of Alison Urie and Andrew Howie: https://thewaywardpuritans.bandcamp.com/track/1976
Yes, for the eagle-eyed, the earlier version was called ‘1976’, while the new version is called ‘No fear (1975)’. I was talking to my brother about this yesterday and he insists that the Barra trip was in 1975; apparently we were in Lyon for the heatwave of 1976. Therein lies a salutary tale: Memory might be a great source material for songs, but it isn’t always reliable!
(c) Fergus McNeill, 2021