Song for August – Song and a Chat

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Episode #199: Song For August (Song starts at 3:08)

Welcome to another song – and another 30 mins of observations, humour, with a particular focus on songwriting.

For this episode, as it happens, I found a couple of different of versions of Song #396, Song For August, using the same lyrics. Both done in 1994. One was written on the piano by myself. The version we went with ( and quite rightly) is the one Paul Dredge and myself wrote on guitar (Paul) and voice (me).

This was one of 12 songs which Paul and I decided to record one weekend, years later in Melbourne Australia. We were joined my the marvellous Earl Pollard. We’ll always miss his great drumming, as sadly he’s no longer with us.

It was another person passing over that gave me the motivation to write these lyrics. His death had a profound effect on me. Not long after I found myself out on the road by myself. I was a bit thin, struggling a bit really.

Hanging on in there was the only choice to make. But sometimes it’s a rough road, isn’t. There’s a line in the song ‘standing on my own two feet’. It’s about surviving then, hanging in there against the odds, perhaps. The lyrics came quite quickly, as they tend to.

When it came to writing the song with Paul on guitar, the song pretty much came in one take – definitely one fast burst of continuous creativity.

I include the demo, which was recorded immediately after we wrote it, so basically we wrote it then recorded it in no time. Great fun, when you’ve got two minds, two artists working together, communicating without speaking, trusting each other, it really is gold.

Towards the end of this episode, I decided to compare the two different versions of the song. It’s fascinating , vocal phrasing. Groups of words seem to really dictate the rhythmical aspect of a phrase, for sure…

I hope you enjoy hearing how this song came about. It was good fun, finding these old demos and bringing this episode together.

If you do find someone to write with, and it goes well, hang on to that relationship. Paul and I have just about wrapped up what will be our 6th folk rock album.

You can find ‘Song For August’ on our album (appropriately named) Lost In Time ( the recording session was in 2012, I think (18 years after we wrote the song!) The album is currently only on Bandcamp. www.petepascoe.bandcamp.com.

The whole album was recorded and mixed in two studio sessions, somewhat crazily, but that’s all the time we had.

I still have the masters for this album, I think it’s nearly time to revisit some of the recordings and make a few changes here and there – just a few.

So with songs, I think it’s really important not to be afraid to discard parts, even whole versions of songs as we did in this case. I’m wondering whether I just plain forgot I wrote the song on the piano piano fist. Regardless, I’m glad it was forgotten. There’s something about the song Paul and I wrote, the number one thing would be feeling, there’s lots of that here…see what you think,

Here we go, Song For August.