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selenakSo, here I am, reading casually an interview with Elvis Costello in this weekend's Observer , in which he mentions playing Penny Lane earlier this year in the White House, when Paul McCartney got the Gershwin Award for Popular Song. ( "Paul was great. He sat in that room all afternoon while we were rehearsing, so that cut down the intimidation factor by about 50%. But still it was pretty weird playing 'Penny Lane' to him in that room with George and Martha Washington on the wall and a marine in full dress uniform playing the piccolo trumpet.") Self, thought I, you love Penny Lane and there aren't nearly enough cover versions, check out whether YouTube has it. (Last time I looked, there were only snippets from the award giving itself and from everyone singing Hey Jude at the end. (Also any number of crazy comments about Obama being a socialist. I really wish I could make every single right wing nutter who misuses the word "socialist" to describe a centrist American politician read not only Das Kapital but the collected works of Ferdinand Lasalle. And Rosa Luxemburg's letters. Oh, hell, throw in Shaw's The Intelligent Woman's Guide To Capitalism and Socialism as well.) Lo and behold, not only was the Elvis Costello version of Penny Lane up but the other McCartney-written (or co-written) songs covered during that event by a rich variety of artists as well. Which made me squee and hum along. Naturally, I have to share!
The first idea for Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was to make this an album with a Liverpool theme. They dropped that soon, but retained the Liverpool idea for a single. Both Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane are inspired by childhood memories, from John and Paul respectively. The two songs make a great contrast/complimentary, like their authors. If Strawberry Fields is all first person psychodelic introspection, Penny Lane is a third person collection of technicolor snapshots, a short story conjuring up a sense of place and characters that's ever so slightly distorted (the blue suburban sky and the pouring rain happen together, it seems, the pretty nurse, wearing a uniform like the late Mary McCartney did, is aware she's in a play - "she is anyway"...)... and there's that amalgan of pop and classic again, the piccolo trumpet solo. How this came to be is a neat illustration of both how producers George Martin's collaboration with the two brilliant and yet completely untrained composers (err, three - sorry, George Harrison!) fate had delivered to him worked. (Neither Paul nor John ever had regular music lessons. John learned banjo chords from his mother and then guitar chords from Paul; Paul had a bit of piano demonstrations from his father and taught himself to play guitar, once he figured out he needed to reverse the strings for left-handedness. Neither was able to read a score, let alone write it.) As engineer Geoff Emerick describes it:
(Paul) was still after that one last bit of magic, and inspiration came to him one night while he was home watching a television programme featuring a performance of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto no.2. That evening, we were in the studio and Paul couldn't stop talking about it. "What was that tiny little trumpet that fellow was playing?" he asked us. "I couldn't believe the sound he was making!"
George Martin's classical training never came in more handy. "That's called a piccolo trumpet," he said, "and the chap playing it was David Mason, who happens to be a friend of mine."
"Fantastic!" exclaimed Paul. "Let's get him in here and have him overdub it." A few days later I found myself carefully placing a microphone in front of Mason, who was himself quite famous in the classical world as the principal trumpeter for the prestigious Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The only problem was that no music had been prepared for him to play; instead, he had to sit there while Paul hummed and sang the parts he was hearing in his head, George Martin writing the notes out of hand. Eventually, though, the score was worked out to Paul's satisfaction, and he headed up to the control room to listen as we began rolling tape. True professional that he was, Mason played it perfectly the first time through, including the extraordinarily demanding solo which ended on a note that was almost impossibly high. It was, quite simply, the performance of his life.
The piccolo trumpet being such an piece de resistance for the song, I'm glad Elvis Costello's version includes it. He sings the song very well, too, and his little introduction story made me smile:
More Penny Lane facts from Many Years From Now:
There is a bus stop called Penny Lane. There was a barber shop called Bioletti's with head shots of the haircuts you can have in the window and I just took it all and arted it up a little bit to make it sound like he was having a picture exhibition in his window. It was all based on real things; there was a bank on the corner so I imagined the banker, it was not a real person, and his slightly dubious habits and the little children laughing at him, and the pouring rain. The fire station was a bit of poetic licence; there's a fire station about half a mile down the road, not actually in Penny Lane, but we needed a third verse so we took that and I was very pleased with the line 'It's a clean machine'. I still like that as a phrase, you occasionally hit a lucky little phrase and it becomes more than a phrase. So the banker and the barber shop and the fire station were all real locations.
There is 'a shelter in the middle of the roundabout' at Smithdown Place, known to the locals as the Penny Lane Roundabout, where Church Road meets Smithdown Road. It is now occupied by a cafe, but was then used as a place to meet people or shelter while waiting for a bus. John and I would often meet at Penny Lane. That was where someone would stand and sell you poppies each year on British Legion poppy day; where John and I would put a shilling in the can and get ourselves a poppy. That was a memory. We fantasised the nurse selling poppies from a tray, which Americans used to think was puppies! Which again is an interesting image. I was a choirboy at a church opposite called St Barnabas so it had a lot of associations for me. When I came to write it, John came over and helped me with the third verse, as often was the case. We were writing childhood memories: recently faded memories from eight or ten years before, so it was a recent nostalgia, pleasant memories for both of us. All the places were still there, and because we remembered it so clearly we could have gone on.
Pause a moment to reflect the oddness that this nostalgia hit them when they were in their mid-twenties. The next song was also inspired by a memory, but of a very different type, and not in a nostalgic way. Band on the Run, the title track of Paul's mid-Seventies album of the same name, was inspired by a sentence murmured by George Harrison during the bitter, bitter 1969 sessions - "if we ever get out of here". It was written, or rather, rewritten, under extraordinary circumstances, because the recording of the album took place in Lagos, Nigeria, and almost the first thing that happened upon arrival was that the McCartneys were mugged, which meant the loss of demo tapes and note books with the songs meant for the album. So he had to rewrite what he remembered and/or make up new ones. This resulted in the first McCartney solo album John Lennon was complimentary about in public. Peter Ames Carlin's description of the titel song is great:Listen and think hard about how inventive this 5 minute-plus rock suite really is. The modular structure; the abrupt shifts in tempo and sound; the way it's all constructed to fit a kind of impressionistic narrative about the joys, complications and endless opportunities for transcendence that go along with music and -- more than anything -- being in a rock 'n' roll band. Section by section, now: Stuck inside these four walls....lord, it's every dead-end room you've ever inhabited, at home, in school, at some crappy job you thought you'd never escape, and just when you least expect it, even at the height of fame. If I ever get out of here.... the guitars turn crunchy, the percussion cracks like a pistol shot as the dead-end becomes fame itself; e.g., straight-up memories of the Beatlemania days, the endless hours of being cooped up in dressing rooms while the world surged madly at their door. Then....that breathttaking symphonic leap up to the central verse and chorus of the song and the point where...The rain exploded with a mighty crash/as we fell into the sun.... and the band is back on the run, soaring above the clouds and far from the grasp of any number of antagonists: the sherrif, the county judge (who held a grudge), even the undertaker. The music soars. The voices call out ecstatically (Yeeeeah!) Four minutes in, and the album is way above the clouds.
(YouTube also delivered a version where Grohl sings this in tandem with Paul on another concert.)
Blackbird - by the way, Paul & birds seem to be a surefire song combination, given this one, Bluebird and the much later Jenny Wren - is one of the few songs on the White Album which is neither parody nor satire. From the horse's mouth:
The original inspiration was from a well-known piece by Bach, which I never know the title of, which George and I had learned to play; he better than me actually. Part of its structure is a particular harmonic thing between the melody and the bass line which intrigued me. Bach was always one of our favourite composers once we discovered him; we felt we had a lot in common with him. For some reason we thought his music was very similar to ours and we latched on to him amazingly quickly. We also liked the stories of him being the church organist and wopping this stuff out weekly, which was rather similar to what we were doing. We were very pleased to hear that. I developed the melody on guitar based on the Bach piece and took it somewhere else, took it to another level, then I just fitted tile words to it. I had in mind a black woman, rather than a bird. Those were the days of the civil-rights movement, which all of us cared passionately about, so this was really a song from me to a black woman, experiencing these problems in the States: 'Let me encourage you to keep trying, to keep your faith, there is hope.' As is often the case with my things, a veiling took place so, rather than say 'Black woman living in Little Rock' and be very specific, she became a bird, became symbolic, so you could apply it to your particular problem. This is one of my themes: take a sad song and make it better.
Very appropriately, here the song is performed by a black singer, Corinne Bailey Rae, with Herbie Hancock.
Some YouTube users seem to consider the Jonas Brothers singing a Beatles song sacrilege. Now I must admit I hadn't heard them before, but I take it they're a boy band - you know, that fits with Drive My Car. It's a cheerful, cheeky song which I can't imagine older singers pulling off credibly; full of the black humour the middle period Beatles thrived on. It was a classic Lennon/McCartney cooperation:
The lyrics were disastrous and I knew it. Often you just block songs out and words just come into your mind and when they do it's hard to get rid of them. You often quote other songs too and you know you've got to get rid of them, but sometimes it's very difficult to find a more suitable phrase than the one that has insinuated itself into your consciousness. This is one of the songs where John and I came nearest to having a dry session. The lyrics I brought in were something to do with golden rings, which is always fatal. 'Rings' is fatal anyway, 'rings' always rhymes with 'things' and I knew it was a bad idea. I came in and I said, 'These aren't good lyrics but it's a good tune.' The tune was nice, the tune was there, I'd done the melody. Well, we tried, and John couldn't think of anything, and we tried and eventually it was, 'Oh let's leave it, let's get off this one.' 'No, no. We can do it, we can do it.' So we had a break, maybe had a cigarette or a cup of tea, then we came back to it, and somehow it became 'drive my car' instead of 'gold-en rings', and then it was wonderful because this nice tongue-in-cheek idea came and suddenly there was a girl there, the heroine of the story, and the story developed and had a little sting in the tail like 'Norwegian Wood' had, which was 'I actually haven't got a car, but when I get one you'll be a terrific chauffeur'. So to me it was LA chicks, 'You can be my chauffeur', and it also meant 'you can be my lover'. 'Drive my car' was an old blues euphemism for sex, so in the end all is revealed. Black humour crept in and saved the day. It wrote itself then.
For a man famous for his self-admitted sentimentality in songs, Paul actually wrote one of the starkest, most unsentimental songs around on love falling irrevocably apart. (Supposedly inspired by his stormy relationship with Jane Asher, which he neither confirmed nor denied.) I think the original works for me a bit better than Emmylou Harris' version because she slows down the tempo which adds more pathos, and that I don't think the song wants or needs; but her version is beautiful anyway. Also, I find it interesting that she didn't change the "she" to "he" in the song lyrics, which back in the day most female artists covering a Beatles song did:
We can work it out is sung by Stevie Wonder in the White House, and while this is a cool, funky version, I keep thinking while listening to it - "but this is a song for two lead singers, that's the point". Though maybe I'm wrong, and the lyrics work with a single singer being the "I"? Anyway, quoth John in 1980 about this song: "You've got Paul writing, 'We can work it out / We can work it out'—real optimistic, y'know, and me, impatient: 'Life is very short, and there's no time / For fussing and fighting, my friend.'" Paul's take: "I wrote it as a more up-tempo thing, country and western. I had the idea, the tide, had a couple of verses and the basic idea for it, then I took it to John to finish it off and we wrote the middle together. Which is very John: 'Life is very short. There's no time for fussing and fighting, my friend.' Then it was George Harrison's idea to put the middle into waltz time, like a German waltz. That came on the session, it was one of the cases of the arrangement being done on the session. The other thing that arrived on the session was we found an old harmonium hidden away in the studio, and said, 'Oh, this'd be a nice colour on it.' We put the chords on with the harmonium as a wash, just a basic held chord, what you would call a pad these days. The lyrics might have been personal. It is often a good way to talk to someone or to work your own thoughts out. It saves you going to a psychiatrist, you allow yourself to say what you might not say in person."
And in conclusion, Jack White dong a medley of the White Album song Mother Nature's Son and the McCartney solo song That Would Be Something. Not a combination I'd have thought of, but it works very well:
Jack White Mother Nature's Son/ That Would Be Something
I already mentioned the infamous history of The Long and Winding Road on the Let it Be album in a previous post (short version: Phil Spector remixed it, adding the female backup chorus and the orchestration, without consulting Paul despite Paul living only a few minutes from the Abbey Road studios and thus more than available; this was signed off by John; it's one of the six items cited in the lawsuit), so whenever I come across a good version of that song, I'm relieved. Paul said he'd written it with Ray Charles in mind, mid-breakup:
It doesn't sound like him at all, because it's me singing and I don't sound anything like Ray, but sometimes you get a person in your mind, just for an attitude, just for a place to be, so that your mind is somewhere rather than nowhere, and you place it by thinking, Oh, I love that Ray Charles, and think, Well, what might he do then? So that was in my mind, and would have probably had some bearing on the chord structure of it, which is slightly jazzy. I think I could attribute that to having Ray in my mind when I wrote that one. It's a rather sad song. I like writing sad songs, it's a good bag to get into because you can actually acknowledge some deeper feelings of your own and put them in it. It's a good vehicle, it saves having to go to a psychiatrist. Songwriting often performs that feat, you say it but you don't embarrass yourself because it's only a song, or is it? You are putting the things that are bothering you on the table and you are reviewing them, but because it's a song, you don't have to argue with anyone. I was a bit flipped out and tripped out at that time. It's a sad song because it's all about the unattainable; the person you're losing; the door you never quite reach. This is the road that you never get to the end of.
Faith Hill isn't Ray Charles, either, but she makes the song work for her:
The first idea for Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was to make this an album with a Liverpool theme. They dropped that soon, but retained the Liverpool idea for a single. Both Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane are inspired by childhood memories, from John and Paul respectively. The two songs make a great contrast/complimentary, like their authors. If Strawberry Fields is all first person psychodelic introspection, Penny Lane is a third person collection of technicolor snapshots, a short story conjuring up a sense of place and characters that's ever so slightly distorted (the blue suburban sky and the pouring rain happen together, it seems, the pretty nurse, wearing a uniform like the late Mary McCartney did, is aware she's in a play - "she is anyway"...)... and there's that amalgan of pop and classic again, the piccolo trumpet solo. How this came to be is a neat illustration of both how producers George Martin's collaboration with the two brilliant and yet completely untrained composers (err, three - sorry, George Harrison!) fate had delivered to him worked. (Neither Paul nor John ever had regular music lessons. John learned banjo chords from his mother and then guitar chords from Paul; Paul had a bit of piano demonstrations from his father and taught himself to play guitar, once he figured out he needed to reverse the strings for left-handedness. Neither was able to read a score, let alone write it.) As engineer Geoff Emerick describes it:
(Paul) was still after that one last bit of magic, and inspiration came to him one night while he was home watching a television programme featuring a performance of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto no.2. That evening, we were in the studio and Paul couldn't stop talking about it. "What was that tiny little trumpet that fellow was playing?" he asked us. "I couldn't believe the sound he was making!"
George Martin's classical training never came in more handy. "That's called a piccolo trumpet," he said, "and the chap playing it was David Mason, who happens to be a friend of mine."
"Fantastic!" exclaimed Paul. "Let's get him in here and have him overdub it." A few days later I found myself carefully placing a microphone in front of Mason, who was himself quite famous in the classical world as the principal trumpeter for the prestigious Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The only problem was that no music had been prepared for him to play; instead, he had to sit there while Paul hummed and sang the parts he was hearing in his head, George Martin writing the notes out of hand. Eventually, though, the score was worked out to Paul's satisfaction, and he headed up to the control room to listen as we began rolling tape. True professional that he was, Mason played it perfectly the first time through, including the extraordinarily demanding solo which ended on a note that was almost impossibly high. It was, quite simply, the performance of his life.
The piccolo trumpet being such an piece de resistance for the song, I'm glad Elvis Costello's version includes it. He sings the song very well, too, and his little introduction story made me smile:
More Penny Lane facts from Many Years From Now:
There is a bus stop called Penny Lane. There was a barber shop called Bioletti's with head shots of the haircuts you can have in the window and I just took it all and arted it up a little bit to make it sound like he was having a picture exhibition in his window. It was all based on real things; there was a bank on the corner so I imagined the banker, it was not a real person, and his slightly dubious habits and the little children laughing at him, and the pouring rain. The fire station was a bit of poetic licence; there's a fire station about half a mile down the road, not actually in Penny Lane, but we needed a third verse so we took that and I was very pleased with the line 'It's a clean machine'. I still like that as a phrase, you occasionally hit a lucky little phrase and it becomes more than a phrase. So the banker and the barber shop and the fire station were all real locations.
There is 'a shelter in the middle of the roundabout' at Smithdown Place, known to the locals as the Penny Lane Roundabout, where Church Road meets Smithdown Road. It is now occupied by a cafe, but was then used as a place to meet people or shelter while waiting for a bus. John and I would often meet at Penny Lane. That was where someone would stand and sell you poppies each year on British Legion poppy day; where John and I would put a shilling in the can and get ourselves a poppy. That was a memory. We fantasised the nurse selling poppies from a tray, which Americans used to think was puppies! Which again is an interesting image. I was a choirboy at a church opposite called St Barnabas so it had a lot of associations for me. When I came to write it, John came over and helped me with the third verse, as often was the case. We were writing childhood memories: recently faded memories from eight or ten years before, so it was a recent nostalgia, pleasant memories for both of us. All the places were still there, and because we remembered it so clearly we could have gone on.
Pause a moment to reflect the oddness that this nostalgia hit them when they were in their mid-twenties. The next song was also inspired by a memory, but of a very different type, and not in a nostalgic way. Band on the Run, the title track of Paul's mid-Seventies album of the same name, was inspired by a sentence murmured by George Harrison during the bitter, bitter 1969 sessions - "if we ever get out of here". It was written, or rather, rewritten, under extraordinary circumstances, because the recording of the album took place in Lagos, Nigeria, and almost the first thing that happened upon arrival was that the McCartneys were mugged, which meant the loss of demo tapes and note books with the songs meant for the album. So he had to rewrite what he remembered and/or make up new ones. This resulted in the first McCartney solo album John Lennon was complimentary about in public. Peter Ames Carlin's description of the titel song is great:Listen and think hard about how inventive this 5 minute-plus rock suite really is. The modular structure; the abrupt shifts in tempo and sound; the way it's all constructed to fit a kind of impressionistic narrative about the joys, complications and endless opportunities for transcendence that go along with music and -- more than anything -- being in a rock 'n' roll band. Section by section, now: Stuck inside these four walls....lord, it's every dead-end room you've ever inhabited, at home, in school, at some crappy job you thought you'd never escape, and just when you least expect it, even at the height of fame. If I ever get out of here.... the guitars turn crunchy, the percussion cracks like a pistol shot as the dead-end becomes fame itself; e.g., straight-up memories of the Beatlemania days, the endless hours of being cooped up in dressing rooms while the world surged madly at their door. Then....that breathttaking symphonic leap up to the central verse and chorus of the song and the point where...The rain exploded with a mighty crash/as we fell into the sun.... and the band is back on the run, soaring above the clouds and far from the grasp of any number of antagonists: the sherrif, the county judge (who held a grudge), even the undertaker. The music soars. The voices call out ecstatically (Yeeeeah!) Four minutes in, and the album is way above the clouds.
(YouTube also delivered a version where Grohl sings this in tandem with Paul on another concert.)
Blackbird - by the way, Paul & birds seem to be a surefire song combination, given this one, Bluebird and the much later Jenny Wren - is one of the few songs on the White Album which is neither parody nor satire. From the horse's mouth:
The original inspiration was from a well-known piece by Bach, which I never know the title of, which George and I had learned to play; he better than me actually. Part of its structure is a particular harmonic thing between the melody and the bass line which intrigued me. Bach was always one of our favourite composers once we discovered him; we felt we had a lot in common with him. For some reason we thought his music was very similar to ours and we latched on to him amazingly quickly. We also liked the stories of him being the church organist and wopping this stuff out weekly, which was rather similar to what we were doing. We were very pleased to hear that. I developed the melody on guitar based on the Bach piece and took it somewhere else, took it to another level, then I just fitted tile words to it. I had in mind a black woman, rather than a bird. Those were the days of the civil-rights movement, which all of us cared passionately about, so this was really a song from me to a black woman, experiencing these problems in the States: 'Let me encourage you to keep trying, to keep your faith, there is hope.' As is often the case with my things, a veiling took place so, rather than say 'Black woman living in Little Rock' and be very specific, she became a bird, became symbolic, so you could apply it to your particular problem. This is one of my themes: take a sad song and make it better.
Very appropriately, here the song is performed by a black singer, Corinne Bailey Rae, with Herbie Hancock.
Some YouTube users seem to consider the Jonas Brothers singing a Beatles song sacrilege. Now I must admit I hadn't heard them before, but I take it they're a boy band - you know, that fits with Drive My Car. It's a cheerful, cheeky song which I can't imagine older singers pulling off credibly; full of the black humour the middle period Beatles thrived on. It was a classic Lennon/McCartney cooperation:
The lyrics were disastrous and I knew it. Often you just block songs out and words just come into your mind and when they do it's hard to get rid of them. You often quote other songs too and you know you've got to get rid of them, but sometimes it's very difficult to find a more suitable phrase than the one that has insinuated itself into your consciousness. This is one of the songs where John and I came nearest to having a dry session. The lyrics I brought in were something to do with golden rings, which is always fatal. 'Rings' is fatal anyway, 'rings' always rhymes with 'things' and I knew it was a bad idea. I came in and I said, 'These aren't good lyrics but it's a good tune.' The tune was nice, the tune was there, I'd done the melody. Well, we tried, and John couldn't think of anything, and we tried and eventually it was, 'Oh let's leave it, let's get off this one.' 'No, no. We can do it, we can do it.' So we had a break, maybe had a cigarette or a cup of tea, then we came back to it, and somehow it became 'drive my car' instead of 'gold-en rings', and then it was wonderful because this nice tongue-in-cheek idea came and suddenly there was a girl there, the heroine of the story, and the story developed and had a little sting in the tail like 'Norwegian Wood' had, which was 'I actually haven't got a car, but when I get one you'll be a terrific chauffeur'. So to me it was LA chicks, 'You can be my chauffeur', and it also meant 'you can be my lover'. 'Drive my car' was an old blues euphemism for sex, so in the end all is revealed. Black humour crept in and saved the day. It wrote itself then.
For a man famous for his self-admitted sentimentality in songs, Paul actually wrote one of the starkest, most unsentimental songs around on love falling irrevocably apart. (Supposedly inspired by his stormy relationship with Jane Asher, which he neither confirmed nor denied.) I think the original works for me a bit better than Emmylou Harris' version because she slows down the tempo which adds more pathos, and that I don't think the song wants or needs; but her version is beautiful anyway. Also, I find it interesting that she didn't change the "she" to "he" in the song lyrics, which back in the day most female artists covering a Beatles song did:
We can work it out is sung by Stevie Wonder in the White House, and while this is a cool, funky version, I keep thinking while listening to it - "but this is a song for two lead singers, that's the point". Though maybe I'm wrong, and the lyrics work with a single singer being the "I"? Anyway, quoth John in 1980 about this song: "You've got Paul writing, 'We can work it out / We can work it out'—real optimistic, y'know, and me, impatient: 'Life is very short, and there's no time / For fussing and fighting, my friend.'" Paul's take: "I wrote it as a more up-tempo thing, country and western. I had the idea, the tide, had a couple of verses and the basic idea for it, then I took it to John to finish it off and we wrote the middle together. Which is very John: 'Life is very short. There's no time for fussing and fighting, my friend.' Then it was George Harrison's idea to put the middle into waltz time, like a German waltz. That came on the session, it was one of the cases of the arrangement being done on the session. The other thing that arrived on the session was we found an old harmonium hidden away in the studio, and said, 'Oh, this'd be a nice colour on it.' We put the chords on with the harmonium as a wash, just a basic held chord, what you would call a pad these days. The lyrics might have been personal. It is often a good way to talk to someone or to work your own thoughts out. It saves you going to a psychiatrist, you allow yourself to say what you might not say in person."
And in conclusion, Jack White dong a medley of the White Album song Mother Nature's Son and the McCartney solo song That Would Be Something. Not a combination I'd have thought of, but it works very well:
Jack White Mother Nature's Son/ That Would Be Something
I already mentioned the infamous history of The Long and Winding Road on the Let it Be album in a previous post (short version: Phil Spector remixed it, adding the female backup chorus and the orchestration, without consulting Paul despite Paul living only a few minutes from the Abbey Road studios and thus more than available; this was signed off by John; it's one of the six items cited in the lawsuit), so whenever I come across a good version of that song, I'm relieved. Paul said he'd written it with Ray Charles in mind, mid-breakup:
It doesn't sound like him at all, because it's me singing and I don't sound anything like Ray, but sometimes you get a person in your mind, just for an attitude, just for a place to be, so that your mind is somewhere rather than nowhere, and you place it by thinking, Oh, I love that Ray Charles, and think, Well, what might he do then? So that was in my mind, and would have probably had some bearing on the chord structure of it, which is slightly jazzy. I think I could attribute that to having Ray in my mind when I wrote that one. It's a rather sad song. I like writing sad songs, it's a good bag to get into because you can actually acknowledge some deeper feelings of your own and put them in it. It's a good vehicle, it saves having to go to a psychiatrist. Songwriting often performs that feat, you say it but you don't embarrass yourself because it's only a song, or is it? You are putting the things that are bothering you on the table and you are reviewing them, but because it's a song, you don't have to argue with anyone. I was a bit flipped out and tripped out at that time. It's a sad song because it's all about the unattainable; the person you're losing; the door you never quite reach. This is the road that you never get to the end of.
Faith Hill isn't Ray Charles, either, but she makes the song work for her:
