EGYPT

Do you dream?. Like Philosophy, this started with a magnetic poetry kit. I was picking out phrases that I liked, and the lyric was built around them. Having said that, I knew what I was trying to say - that we shouldn't forget to be hopeful for tomorrow, instead of just seeing it as the day after today.

Tumbleweed. This is a very personal song, giving a perspective on a dead relationship. The characters in it, like all my songs, are of course fictitious, but this song in particular clearly draws on life, and of all the songs I've ever written, this is probably the one that I felt the most personally about. I was very upset while recording it, and wept a couple of times, particularly about the first verse. Any emotion that you hear in the vocal isn't acted, it was genuine.

This started as an attempt to record some music for a family video. I had come back from Egypt with ten hours of film footage and the plan was to condense it and put some of it to music. I only needed about three songs for this, and recording sessions started late in January 2006. To begin with I was using an open source program called Audacity, and three of the songs were recorded that way. Later I acquired a commercial program called Music Creator which I used for the rest of the CD, albeit only as a midi sequencer (I didn't use DXi software synthesisers until later). I got so interested in all this that I didn't stop at three songs but kept going.

I had no trouble writing the songs, although at this point I wasn't orchestrating them expansively enough, or synthesising them well enough, and I was awkward at the microphone. The CD that took shape followed a storyline very roughly – a relationship breaks up, the man goes to Egypt and sees all sorts of wonders while half pondering on his life back home, and ultimately decides to put it all behind him and get on with his life.

Egypt was completed in mid-June 2006. Two pieces were left off it – Rap the map (an early test piece with a synthesised spoken vocal) and Sound on the water (inspired by prayer calls echoing across the Nile, but not used as Oona didn't like it). Go on home was very nearly left off, due to being too repetitive for a song nearly four minutes long. Oona was appalled – she said it was catchy, so it stayed. As of this writing only two copies of the resulting CD exist.


Track listing: Wasted years 3:23, Do you dream? 2:31, What you want 2:25, Tumbleweed 2:48, For God's sake why? 2:43, Visions of Egypt 2:51, The world can wait 3:15, I'm the Pharaoh 2:44, Company man 3:12, The (other) drinking song 2:17, Dead Pharaohs 2:30, Go on home 3:52, Clacket Lane 2:03, Decisions 2:47, Philosophy 2:03, Honeyrabbit (the happy song) 2:04.