Hello Dear Reader
No VoiceOver today - instead you get a video. (In portrait when it would have been better in landscape, but never mind.)
A few weeks ago, someone suggested I might consider diving into my now extensive back catalogue and exploring how a particular song came into being. I have left it up to you to decide which songs you would like to know more about, and in my inaugural post last week, I ruminated on a song called ‘Closer’ and how I ruined the final version by over-egging the pudding. (If you missed that and would like to catch up, all of these videos are available to watch on my YouTube channel.)
This series I will call Only the Old Songs. One of you came up with that as the title - and it made sense to me. As I approach the release of my eighth album - and while I’m excited for you to hear what I’ve been up to for the last two and a half years - there are still so many songs now that mean something to both of us and like the older children of a huge family, they often get overlooked because they’ve always been there. They’re the quiet kid, the one that just gets on with it, doesn’t make a fuss, holds up their side of the bargain and has to watch their younger, flashier siblings get all the attention.
This week, I talk about ‘Happy’, a song that appeared on The Hold Tight, the first of the Year of EPs in 2014. Quite a few people asked to know more about it, and as you can see above, I was eager to oblige.
In the course of making the video, it struck me that some of these songs naturally lend themselves to explorations of more than just the nuts and bolts of making records; they are trying to say more than three and half minutes of pop song will allow them.
‘Happy’ came into being some time between 2013 and 2014. I was approaching my forties, and so were many of my friends. We were many of us in the thick of parenting small children or babies, while trying to keep careers afloat and bills paid, and the lyrics of that Talking Heads song ‘Once in a Lifetime’ had never felt more pertinent:
You may ask yourself, how do I work this?
You may ask yourself, where is that large automobile?
You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house
You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful wife
The consensus at this point in time was not that we were living our lives, but that our lives were living us and we were powerless to stop it. And when some of us did manage to hit pause for a moment to take stock of where we were, it was not where we wanted to be.
Some us knew where we wanted to be, and managed to course correct.
And some of us didn’t.
And those that didn’t did one of two things: they threw grenades into their lives and rebuilt in the aftermath, or slapped a rictus grin on their faces and carried on, not oblivious exactly, but anaesthetised, either by gin or golf or both.
The only books anybody talked to me about during that period were The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up or Reasons to Stay Alive. There was no in-between.
This is not to say that those feelings are confined only to that time in our lives - we can feel that thud of disappointment from finding out that what we thought would make us happy does not, at any age.
That is what ‘Happy’ is all about.
And now I shall leave you to your Wednesday afternoon, as I continue on my singular mission of spreading cheer and sprinkles wherever I go.
I shan’t be news lettering you every week with this series as that’s the kind of behaviour that would put me right off something I might otherwise have been interested in. However, I promise you they won’t all be this glum (last week’s was all about shagging, for example). It’s just that some of you asked for misery and who am I to deny you?
With love as ever,
Nerina xxx
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