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Background to Songs: One Way Home, KHT
Written by Jimmy
One Way Home kicks off our fourth album, King Henry’s Tears. Here’s a little background to the song…
Lyrics: This started at 6AM in the morning in Spain, during our Autumn 2010 jam. Jimmy was up early, at the round kitchen table, alone, staring at the collateral damage from the band’s late night. It started as a simply inventory – five bottles on the table, four fag packs on the floor. Accurate zoom around the room with a coincidental number countdown. The first verse just wrote itself if you fell into the story – ‘three bodies intertwined, too awkward to ignore’. Seemed like the logical outcome of the five bottles on the table, at least in this twisted world of smokers. By that time, Jimmy figured that here’s this drunk smoker intertwined on the floor with two others – surely that person needed a way home, 1 way home. That was kind of it. Other verses followed, included the continuation of the countdown for each verse, references to our smoking drunken cheating hero (we call him Bob, as he appears a lot on the album, King Henry’s Tears) trying to knock on doors and then suddenly aware his partner has the photos. For more on Bob, click here.
Music: This was meant to be a blues song, all the driving funk of Steamroller from James Taylor’s live album. Andy and Jimmy started a version as a blues number and liked it. Ed joined us and said he had a perfect riff that would work, which took the song in a different direction. Here’s Steamroller Blues:
And here’s the blues version we began:
One Way Home – the original Blues Version by AbubillaMusic
After developing both versions in parallel for a while, we chose the Ed version and ran for it. Now it is very important sometime to just let Ed tell his story – gives you very good sense of the song, but also of Ed. Seriously. So this is Ed describing the song-writing:
“One way home – riff popped into my head in the space of 1 millisecond on a tube journey into work. One second mind is totally blank, the next I suddenly have the riff, the sounds, the chords etc. playing around my head. Sat on my shelf waiting for some words for a few months – then decided to take a risk and re-write one of Jimmy’s and Andy’s blues songs using the lyrics but with my riff (Fact Check from Jimmy: he walked into our session recording the blues version of the song and said, ‘how about this?’ It wasn’t a Jimmy-Andy number sitting on a shelf, we were writing it with Ed at the time!) . Struggled getting anything for a chorus until Gus showed me a little D, C#maj, F#maj chord progression he had been wanting to use – that forms the start of the chorus (though changed the F#maj to a minor to keep it a bit more in key and poppy (Factcheck: Ed is the only person in the world that refers to a F# major to minor as poppy). Melody also came very quickly – what you hear is pretty much the way it popped into my head, with a few edits here and there as I wrote as Gus sang (e.g. the bits where it goes up instead of down). Struggling for ages (years?) over mixing, guitar sounds, getting it to sound as big as it should – Mr. Brightside, Rock N Roll Star being the main comparators.” (Factcheck: Andy almost killed Ed during the email exchanges around mixing – comments like ‘more Mr Brightside!’ became very un-helpful at two in the morning)
Ed brought the U-E-U’s in at that point and what followed was a vocal and instrumental extravaganza. At one point we had roughly 90 vocal and instrument tracks going. We had to keep redoing Gus’s vocals to make sure the chorus was ‘I’m on a cliff’s edge I’m at Land’s End’ vs. ‘Lovin’ cleavage of Madeline’ which was a major problem in earlier versions. This, of course, raises the issue of misheard lyrics. Here are our top five, and please click on this for more.
1. Robert Palmer, Addicted To Love: Perceived by some to be an Anti-King of Pop Tirade. Original lyric: “You might as well face it, you’re addicted to love“. Misheard as: “You might as well face it, you’re a dick with a glove.”
2. Abba, Dancing Queen: Continuing the theme that most misheard lyrics are about the listener transposing their anger onto the the innocent lyricists, the ‘listener’ in this case wasn’t very happy with travestites. Original lyric: “see that girls, watch that scene, dig in the dancing queen.” Misheard as: ‘See that girl. Watching her scream, kicking the dancing queen.”
3. Traditional, We Wish You A Merry Christmas: This one makes a lot of sense to me. Original lyric: ‘Now bring us some figgy pudding.” Misheard lyric: ‘Now bring us some friggin’ pudding.” Magic.
4. REM, The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight – “Call me when you try to wake her” is often misheard as “Carve me when you’re in Jamaica” (another good one is ‘This one goes out to the one I love” is misheard as ‘This One goes out to the one eyed – dove”.
5. Elton John, Tiny Dancer – “Hold Me Closer Tiny Dancer” becomes “Hold me Close, Tie me down sir”. The less said about that one the better I feel..
Mixing: We worked hard to strip this song down. We then took the 90 track and started to strip out everything, down to one guitar, bass and drums and lots of U-E-U’s. Lots of questions about where we stop the song. Given how much we stripped it down, we decided to lengthen it (It’s an Abubilla Thing!) and go for two false endings. Ed added a series of guitars toward the end, with various riffs. Rob, Ed and Andy spent a huge amount of time debating this. See Andy’s Separate blog on this.
That’s it. Enjoy.
Jimmy