When I started writing my memoirs and releasing my songs at the beginning of the year, I thought I’d have a story to tell behind each song, no matter how tenuous the link. Maybe where I was when I wrote it, who I was with, how I was feeling. Perhaps something I had observed or read about that led me to pick up my guitar and write. Truth be told though, I don’t know where this particular song came from. I don’t even know what it’s really about. And yet I do believe it somehow. And maybe that’s all some songs need to do, give you enough space and ambiguity to find your own story within it. Some songs I wrote in minutes. Others took me a long time. This song has had a few incarnations over the years but I could never get it right. I laboured over it, writing different sections that would eventually elope and find themselves married to other songs. In the end the solution was simple. I stripped it back to what had been just the chorus and wrote two other verses over the same melody and chord sequence. And now I’m finally happy with it.
It started with a seed, as all songs do. For me, it’s usually a melody. The melodies always came naturally to me, much to the detriment of my lyrics at first, as I just wanted to get the songs out there, no matter how obvious (or just plain bad) the words. I was impatient. But time, and more importantly some wonderful songwriters I had the pleasure of working with and learning from, taught me patience. I now find myself completing songs from a huge reservoir I have had in my head for many years.
I would have been living in Bangkok, Thailand when the seed of this song germinated. Certainly when I play it now, I am transported back to that time. It was 2002 and I was in my late 20s. I was teaching English in a college but would also go out busking in Siam Square, one of Bangkok’s shopping districts. At first, I lived in a guest house tucked away down a dark alley off the bustling, neon-lit Khao San Road. Then, a Thai friend of mine put me up in her vacant ‘maid’s quarter’ of her condominium on the other side of the city. She was rarely there, always travelling between Japan and Thailand for work. It was a sparse room with no windows. The heat at night was unbearable, and yet there was something comforting about my anonymity there. I was hidden from the world up in that tower and it suited me fine. Some nights, I would take my guitar and climb to the rooftop to gaze upon the city.
Bangkok was unlike anywhere else I had ever been. It had a unique energy about it, a part-dystopian entanglement of beauty and danger, of wealth and poverty, of the old and the new. It was a city of a million stories. I would marvel at it from my vantage point on those warm evenings, as I picked my guitar and plucked melodies from the air, appearing to me like fireflies in the night.
Anyway, enough of that. Here’s my song. You can find your own story within it if you like. Enjoy 😉 x
https://nigelashcroft.bandcamp.com/track/let-sleeping-dogs-lie
52 Silent Songs 