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Until I Found You (MP3, 7.3MB)
Until I Found You (WAV, 40MB)
End of Tears (MP3, 5.8MB)
End of Tears (WAV, 32MB)
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Making End of Tears: Tweaking the Guitar
Last time we were in the land of love songs. La la land, perhaps. In today’s episode we’re still there but all is not what it seems. We have two songs where the narrator is celebrating a new life, a fresh start, discarding the past: Until I Found You and End of Tears.
They’re both very simple love songs, nothing clever or fancy. But in terms of their inspiration or how you could interpret them, they have some other resonances.
I wrote Until I Found You in the 1990s when I was in an acoustic trio called Hungry Ghosts. I just wanted to write a fun but ‘vintage’ pop song, like the ones Van Morrison would fill his set with. But as I wrote it I began to realise it was a love song to Hungry Ghosts themselves, to the band that had enabled my songs to get an audience and given me the confidence to get back onstage after years of thinking I’d missed my chance. ‘In these days of pointless talking, you have given me my song.’ Now when I sing it, it’s for the Heaven Sent and all the musicians who’ve given life to these ramblings over the years.
End of Tears started in the 2000s as an imagined ‘epic’ song called The Dizzying Heights, which was some sort of mytho-spiritual something. If that sounds vague, it’s because the song was uncomfortably vague. I’m not one of those who insist you should be able to literally explain every line of a song, but in this case I knew in my heart I was bluffing – there is a difference! I always liked the tune, though. It was inspired by Richard Thompson’s Devonside and Jet Plane In A Rocking Chair and also by an older song of mine called When Will We Be Touched Again?
Some years later I read an interview with Leonard Cohen about a song on I’m Your Man called I Can’t Forget. He talked of how that song was originally a biblical kind of myth but he just couldn’t get behind the lyrics he’d written. One day he just threw it all out and decided to write simply and directly about getting up in the morning. I thought of Dizzying Heights – what if I could do that? What would a straight pop song be like? And I quickly and easily wrote the words you see below.
Over time, singing it, I realised another interpretation could be put on it, that of someone joining a group that promises answers to all their problems. Falling in love with a person and falling in love with a group, whether religious, therapeutic or political, are very close and, you could say, equally delusional. I came close to joining one, several of my friends have been in them, and a group that I did join for a few years was labelled a cult by some people (I don’t think it was justified but that’s a whole other story). Hence the story of the video, featuring me as a cult leader. Directed and filmed by my friend Terry Dray in Bannermans and Mid Calder.
Until I Found You
The only song I sang was YesterdayMy only colour deepest blue
The only path I took was down, down, down
Until I found you I thought my useful life was finished
And nothing to look forward to
With every day I was diminished
Until I found you Until I
Until I
Until I found you And I was living in my memories
But they could not see me through
I knew it had to come to them, them or me
That’s when I found you I know you won’t be here forever
Nothing good can last for long
But in this age of pointless talking
You have given me my song My only skill was in evasion
Only thing that I knew how to do
I’d never heard, never tasted, never felt, never seen
Until I found you Until I
Until I
Until I found you
Norman: acoustic guitar
Fi: electric guitar
John: keyboards
James: bass
Antoine Edery: drums
The verse is E, A, B7 and C#m
The chorus is F#m, G#m, A, G#m, A, B7, E
End of Tears
From the very first lookOn the very first day
For the very first time
I was blown away To the end of tears
To the end of time
I know I’m yours
And the world is mine I was lost in time
I was lost in space
Till I crossed a line
Now I know my place
To the end of tears …
They tell me I’m a fool to commit myselfThey say I’ve drawn a losing hand
They tell me it’s a world of uncertainty
But not for me
I know where I stand
To the end of tears …
Norman: acoustic and lead guitar
Fi: electric and picking guitar
James: bass
John: keyboards
Suzy: drums
Chord-wise it’s very simple. The verse is E, A and C#m
The chorus is C#m, A, E, A, E, B7, E
The middle bit is A and E repeated then B7 to return to the verse structure
Video by Terry Dray for Edgeoftheworld productions.