Looking For Lost Lyrics

The past couple of days have been spent looking for lyrics that I scribbled down somewhere in a fit of inspiration. More lyrics always come along, but it's still awful when you mislay them. Writing songs is just about the closest you can get to taking a snapshot of your soul; self knowledge is so elusive, and like drawing or painting, laying out these things outside your sense of who you are offloads a lot of tension and anxiety. You can see, or hear, exactly who you were on a particular day at a particular time in a particular place, feeling particular feelings.

They were irritating lyrics because they didn't fit properly into the music they landed on, but at the same time they described perfectly a tiny morsel of time and experience that had been so difficult to capture.

I have just found them at the bottom of a pile of books. I had been able to visualise where they were on a page and sure enough there they were, following on from a much more nuts'n'bolts set of instructions about how I am going to mix a track that I have been recording.

The fact is that every cloud has a silver lining, and because I couldn't find the lyrics, I started writing another song so I had something to work on. The other song is much easier: it's one of those songs that began as a dream where I was at a concert and heard someone singing it. My friend Amy used to do this too: hearing a song on the radio in her dream and realising it was actually her own. Soon, you learn to sing the song into a recording device as soon as you wake up. Once you've done that, all you need to do is write the rest of it, which comes along pretty quickly.

The two new songs are going to jostle for attention for a while. It doesn't much matter which one wins; lyrically they are interconnected because they are both about nature. One is melancholy, the other is a celebration, two faces of the natural environment.