What I was alive for

14: Yesterday's Birthday Girl

Recorded July 1997, Savage Sounds, Cleobury Mortimer, Salop
Performers Pete Green (vocal, guitar), the wind (wind chimes)
Producer Paul Savage
Released Effortless cd album January 2004

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This might be the truest love song I've ever written. No, scratch that – plenty of it is still made up. But it came from a very real situation: it was the day after my girlfriend's birthday one year and I was just mucking about on the guitar, and when I playfully asked: "What should I write a song about?" she said: "Me!" An hour or two later I'd come up with this.

Being yesterday's birthday girl struck me as a bit sad: one minute you're the centre of attention, the next it's all over. That turned out to be the source of a little river flowing with other sad things. I ought to point out that my girlfriend really isn't sad all the time any more, and probably that she doesn't like being the centre of attention anyway. The latter, at least, is one thing we don't have in common.

We tried arranging this song for the full band quite a few times; nothing ever quite worked though, so in the end we left it as it was, with just guitar and vocals, and me returning to the guitar. I've played it a few times at solo gigs, but in The Regulars' time it was only ever played live in the acoustic sets we did for Birmingham's annual Artsfest event (the audience's 'has it finished?' silence just afterwards being broken on one occasion by our friend Mr Richard Southall calling out: "Pete Green, you sex ma-chine!").

This was recorded at Paul Savage's place almost as an afterthought to the No Lights For Miles demo tape in the summer of 1997. The other Regulars went out into the farmyard to play football while Paul and I were recording and we shut the windows tight against their voices and the bright July sun. And the version you're listening to now is digitally remastered! I've just cleaned a bit of the noise off the version that appeared on Effortless and compressed the track a bit so you can hear the quieter bits better. Yeah, I know it still sounds crap. That shows you how crap it sounded to start with.

I really like the words and music though. I just want to leave this one here and not say anything else about it. See what you reckon.


Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)

posted by Pete Green @ 00:31