This is the oldest song I've written that I play in a regular set. I was sitting in my English class and looked across at a friend of mine, Alec Taylor. That lunchtime he'd taught me my first three chords on the guitar (G, D and C - That's "Knockin' On Heaven's Door"). He was reading a guitar magazine. That gave me my first line. Every line of that song is related to something I saw, heard or felt during that lesson. When I wrote "Wristbands and Rolexes and rings around the same hand," for example, I had seen Rebecca Wixey (another friend of mine sitting in front of me) who had a Leeds Festival wristband, a watch among other things scattered around her wrists. I don't know why but this grabbed me.
My favourite line in this is "Fences round the last long mile and fences round the tennis court". If you sit in my seat on a wednseday afternoon you can see PE lessons in a tennis court. There are high, green fences around it which reminded me of a prison. Having seen "The Green Mile" the night before it seemed to me to link together quite poetically.
The last verse, however, was written later. Someone by the name of Dale Ellis inspired me for this. She had "Sometimes I wonder if I'm still alive" as a screen name, I asked her about it and she said it was a line in a song of hers. Asking her permission, I used this, and the new carpet in my bedroom, as inspiration for a final verse. If she's reading this I strongly advise her to share some of her songs with more people, because with lines like that they must be good.
This song is about seeing things as they really are, and that is beautifull. If you look at the world, everything in it, there is so much there that if you ever thought about all of it you would never be able to carry on with your life. The song says basically that even though all this is happening, we can carry on. Though is not necessarily a bad thing, we should all from time to time put aside our gift to ignore the beauty in the world and soak it all up. |
