In the summer of 1994, my friend Jack, who was living in England at the time, invited me to attend a songwriting workshop with him at a place called Fen Farm, in a little town called Bury St. Edmunds. The interesting thing about this workshop was that it was run by Ray Davies, yes, that Ray Davies – I think I was singing “Waterloo Sunset” to myself for about a month beforehand. Although meeting Ray was an experience, my favorite part of the week, by far, was the gang of other people I met: Woodstock, Marc, Helen, and the rest. I’ve been back to visit them a couple times, and it’s always like summer camp again – time stops, we have our play date, and then time starts up once more. One time, we had a reunion concert in a small town between London and Brighton, owned by a friend of Woodstock’s who happened to have a concert hall. Nobody came, of course, but we had a blast doing it. We called ourselves the Fire Tribe.
A while back, it occurred to me that there was a song to be written here. Why it took me 13 years to figure that out is beyond me, but, well, I’ve been busy. I knew I wanted it to be about friendship and passion and that way in which time seems to stop, but I didn’t have much more to go on. Two years ago, I saw the gang in London, and we had some lovely moments: a late-night Moroccan meal in Islington, a water taxi down the Thames near sunset from the Tate Modern to Greenwich. So I started with that particular day, and scribbled for a while. But after a page or two, it became clear to me that it wasn’t enough to go on, so I went back the beginning:
They came to get us at the station, drove us to the middle of nowhere
If there was gonna be a murder, this was sure the place to be
It became clear as I wrote that the song was going to be told in chronological order, and so the Moroccan food and the water taxi ride went into the third verse, and the original workshop into the first. The chorus came in one draft. But what happens in the middle?
The reunion concert was an obvious choice. Woodstock’s friend was utterly insane: he owned this wreck of a house, which had full pipe organ in the front hall, and his third floor was occupied by surplus BBC costume inventory, which was accessible only by ladder. I spent quite a while dwelling on this set of images, but ultimately, nothing came of it; it was tremendously evocative, but I couldn’t remember enough useful details to make it work. And I didn’t want to write about how nobody came to the concert, because I didn’t want the song to be that kind of anthem. Instead, I went back to an earlier part of the same trip, a late-night party of Fen Farm alumni, which ultimately featured Woodstock accompanying a B-list pop icon (I think it may have been Lena Lovich) singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in a darkened restaurant in a London alley. You can’t make this stuff up. There were a couple phrases I knew I wanted to keep: “We rode the train with the Bon Jovi army” was a very early line, a reference to the train ride from London to Brighton that night right after a Bon Jovi concert had ended – too good to toss.
But then, the bridge. I had a good second verse, a good third verse, and I had to get from one to the other. It wasn’t even remotely obvious how to do it at the time, and ultimately, I pieced it together one line at a time, and finished it by stealing the first line of the original third verse, because it rhymed with what I was fiddling with.
Sounds pretty workmanlike, doesn’t it? But the fact is that most songs don’t come in a single, profound swoon; they’re cobbled together over a period of days, weeks, or months from pieces lying around the home. You write a riff that you don’t know what to do with, and a week later you have a verse without a riff, and it’s sort of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup moment (surely you remember that ad campaign: “Two great tastes that taste good together…”). Or a line which is just scribbled in the margin of a notebook which you have no plans for, and suddenly it fits like a glove into a completely unrelated song. Truth be told, from the inside, right near the end, it always looks to me like a song is held together with spackle and bailing wire, and if you breathe on it too hard, it’ll shatter. But as time passes, it becomes clear to me that nobody else can tell, and in fact, after a while, I can’t tell myself anymore. Read and listen and tell me what you think.