Song writing has always been something I have enjoyed doing, and there have been many different things that have motivated me to put pen to paper.
I suppose I simply like making rhymes and I like telling stories.
I have had many experiences throughout my lifetime, and the vast majority of them have been consigned to the waste disposal unit in my brain. But some events remain firmly fixed in the memory, and they do so for a reason. It is the events that are unusual, funny, tragic, humiliating or heart warming that escape the waste disposal unit. They are the events that provoke emotion, and those are the stories I like to tell in song.
The songs I write are mostly based on my own experiences. But the emotions they generated in me are hopefully emotions that others can relate to on hearing the songs.
My evolving relationship with my father generated several songs. Our inability to understand each other when I was in my teens was a huge source of friction. He saw me as an idle, daydreaming, long haired, useless son with a head full of music and girls, (In hindsight, a fairly accurate assessment). I saw him as an unreasonable, workaholic, old fashioned, heartless man with no compassion for his wife or family, (with hindsight maybe not so accurate an assessment)
But as the years went by, I grew up and matured, and he aged and mellowed. We eventually became incredibly close and enjoyed many years of a happy father and son relationship.
The emotions at either end of that spectrum remain with me and inspired several songs.
Humorous events, like the unusual circumstances in which I lost my virginity, are favourite topics to write about. I’ve always enjoyed funny songs. As a youngster I was a huge fan of Matt McGinn and sang several of his songs doing floor spots around the folk clubs. Making an audience laugh remains something I derive a great deal of pleasure from.
Matt McGinn
Things that angered me, like the MPs expenses scandal generated songs.
An MP’s expense claim
Events from my working life also feature, although some of the stories I could tell will never make it into a song for legal reasons and my dislike for prison food.
Of course, matters of the heart, as for most song writers, are a big source of emotional inspiration. Waxing lyrical about a new love or lamenting the loss of a loved one are all deeply emotional things. Whilst I have written about such matters, I tend not to sing them publicly. I have focused more upon my failures as a teenage Romeo. I find the humour in those stories more palatable than some of the deeply personal incidents I have experienced.
Entering song writing competitions, where there is a given theme, has generated several of my songs. It is always a challenge to write about a random subject and to do so in a way that approaches the given theme from an angle that no other competitor has thought of. On the day of the event I am always terrified that another competitor will sing before me with a song that has all my punch lines and ideas. To date, this mercifully has never happened.
But now I come to this month’s song, “Lay All My Troubles Aside”. This is a song that evolved from a new situation for me.
I was invited along to a Traditional Music and Song Association of Scotland (T.M.S.A.) song writing workshop in Perth. I had never attended a song writing workshop before and was unsure of how it would work. I was very aware of how I normally write, and it was not sitting in a room with a group of people conjuring up a song on demand. I also had no embryonic ideas of songs floating around in my head. This was going to be a challenge.
Although I didn’t know everyone there, I did know quite a few, and a stalwart of the TMSA, Doris Rougvie, was busy cutting out random pictures from a collection of magazines. She spread out the photographs and invited everyone present to take one.
Doris Rougvie
There was one that stood out to me, and it was of a seascape taken somewhere on the north west coast of Scotland. In the foreground at the bottom of the image there was some sedge grass growing up through sand dunes. Beyond that, a beautiful pale, golden sandy beach with gentle waves lapping at the waters edge. Across the sea, on the horizon was an island with a couple of hilly peaks, and above in a blue sky was a solitary small white cloud.
It was a scene that felt peaceful and tranquil and somewhere that I would have loved to visit. There was no sign of human activity. It was a place of solitude and calm. Within seconds, I was oblivious to the others in the room, and I started to write. The first verse was simply what I could see…
Where the dunes meet the shore
And the shore meets the waves
That lap with the incoming tide
Where the sea meets the island of faraway hills
There I’ll lay all my troubles aside.
Back in the year 2000, I made the most difficult decision of my life. I left my marriage of 25 years. For a long time I had been in love with another woman but had never had the courage to tell her or do anything about it. That year, I told her how I felt about her, and as a result, my life turned upside down. We talked at great length about the implications of what we were considering, which was to leave both our marriages and set up together as a couple.
We had many friends in many places and so we sought out remote, quite locations to discuss our future. She was the sea breeze that ruffled the calm of my sea and this photograph reminded me of the sort of place we would go to escape, and that manifested itself in the lyric of the song.
I wish I had kept the cutting from that magazine, but it was thrown away at the end of the night. However, the memories and emotions that photograph evoked remain with me, and I’m delighted to say, so does the lady who walked hand in hand with me along that shore.
Not being an accomplished musician, I came up with a very basic tune for the song. I was never particularly happy with it and so rarely sang it. Then during the Covid 19 lockdown I became involved in a musical collaboration which involved friends, Ian Simpkins and Dave McLagan, both from Perthshire, and Dave Spittal. Dave, a member of the popular folk group Kindrick, currently lives in Lima in Peru. The lads would record various songs and pass the various leads, harmonies and instrumentals to me and I would stitch them together into videos. It was something that the four of us did for fun during the corona-virus pandemic.
Dave Spittal
It occurred to me that Dave Spittal might be able to put the lyric of the song to a better tune, so I sent the words to Peru for him to have a look at. He immediately resonated with the song and in no time at all a rendition of him singing it was winging its way back to me.
I loved what he had done and set about trawling through video footage I had taken on various visits to places like Oldshoremore, Balnakeil beach at Durness, Sheigra and other locations in north west Scotland.
I put those images together with Dave’s rendition of the song which you can now see and listen to on YouTube.
Lay All My Troubles Aside
Where the dunes meet the shore, and the shore meets the waves
That lap with the incoming tide
Where the sea meets the islands of faraway hills
There I’ll lay all my troubles aside
I’ll lay all my troubles aside
I’ll lay all my troubles aside
Where the sea meets the islands of faraway hills
There I’ll lay all my troubles aside
Where the wisp of a cloud drifts lazily over
A sky of cold winter blue
Where the sea breezes tease the calm of the seas
Then you know I’ll be thinking of you
And I’ll lay all my troubles aside
I’ll lay all my troubles aside
Where the sea meets the islands of faraway hills
There I’ll lay all my troubles aside
Where sandpipers pipe, and the curlew cries
And plovers parade on the sand
Where fulmars glide over the foam on the breeze
At the cusp of the sea and the land
There I’ll lay all my troubles aside
I’ll lay all my troubles aside
Where the sea meets the islands of faraway hills
There I’ll lay all my troubles aside
Where you and I met to escape from them all
Just to walk hand in hand on the shore
Where you and I both laid our troubles aside
How I wish we could walk there once more
And we’d lay all our troubles aside
We’d lay all our troubles aside
Where the sea meets the islands of faraway hills
We would lay all our troubles aside
Where the dunes meet the shore, and the shore meets the waves
That lap with the incoming tide
Where the sea meets the islands of faraway hills
There I’ll lay all my troubles aside