Give ‘Em Smiles

This Saturday morning Give ‘Em Smiles. By Norman Lamont. This song has been putting a smile on my face the last few days, as do the rest of his songs.

I started to get to know Norman through HomeSongs4Life, and last summer we had the chance to get to meet in person when he came to play some Homesongs here in Kintyre. A fantastic songwriter, and performer, and a lovely bloke.

Give ‘em smiles contains great advice for any of us who have a tendency to take ourselves too seriously, and think that everybody else should too.

Here is the cool story behind the song:

”I had a dream in which I was sitting in a theatre while an elderly blues/jazz singer in a sharp suit sang this with a jazz trio. He sat at the front of the stage, the band stood at the back. Between them were three characters - I'm not sure if they were people or apes, but blindfolded - chanted an odd distorted backing vocal. When I woke up I remembered the chorus and bits of the verse, along with the feel of the backing vocal. I put this track together pretty quickly and married it with two American health promotion films from 1939, courtesy of the Prelinger Archive website”.