The Long and Winding Road*

*Apologies to Paul McCartney.

I recently finished adding the last of my legacy albums to my website as well as the greater world. It felt good that there was no more music sitting off in a corner not being heard. I felt pretty good.

Then I had a stroke.

In some sense, that's neither here nor there. It did, however, get me thinking about what all this music was meant to represent, if anything, and what I thought about it after coming close to physically disabled and possibly never being able to play or record again. 

This would be it.

There is also the strange aspect of looking back, of listening to songs recorded long ago with older ears and a longer memory and wondering at how any of it came about in the first place. I don't remember any premeditation. Mostly, it was desire to try something, or I'd hear a song in my head and then try to replicate it, which generally never happened, but which almost always produced something interesting. Then there were all the different sounds that could be produced with the signal effects that were coming out in droves. A whole day could be wasted by simply running a guitar signal through all the parameters the effect box offered.

I never thought "I'm going to write a song about this." Lyrics always came last.

They just happened.

And I think that's what I marvel at most. When I listen to No Love Here, which was recorded in late '85 and early '86, all I remember is how some songs were more difficult to record than others, mostly due to track limitations (4-track) and all the bouncing that was required. On subsequent albums, I did purposely try to limit the number of tracks I need. There is no real continuity between the songs or similarities, i.e. all rock tunes or ballads.

So, I don't know what you make of that. Maybe nothing. In some sense, I was like a shark, recording one after another until the end of Apologia, which I consider the best of the albums from that time, then I slowed way down. The last album, Nothing Left to Say, took 5 years to finish, and I had planned on more, but never got around to it. And of the albums that were done, for the most part I left them on the shelf and only listening to them once a year or so.

No one was going to hear them anyway.

Yet here they are.

Interesting.

©2020 David William Pearce