Ai
By a human being (honest!)
Sorry, got to rush. Today, my 150th consecutive song release is out. It’s called Ai. The lyric below was written without any kind of digital software stimulants.
Living in a world of synchronised faces
A-i, A-i
Dream our dreams in digital spaces
A-i, A-i
Get a grip
Take a trip
Back to the real world
Your touch
Too much
Back in the real world
History will leave no traces
A-i, A-i
Every thought now syndicated
A-i, A-i
Get a grip
Take a trip
Back to the real world
Apathy
Empty
Back in the real world
I can recall
Every love letter
You ever sent me, darling
All I need now
Your breath on my skin
Keep up, Keeping up, All the time, Keep up
Baby, A-i
Don’t ever fall behind, don’t let me see
You cry, A-i
Get a grip
Take a trip
Back in the real
Your touch
Too much
Back in the real
Get a grip
Take a trip
Back in the real
Apathy
Empty
Back In The Real World
Keep up, Keeping up, All the time,
Keep up Baby
Don’t ever fall behind, don’t let me see
You cry
I can recall
Every love letter
You ever sent me, darling
All I need now
Your breath on my skin
Everything Is Wasted
Or maybe not.
The song at the time said Everything Is Wasted.
It does look like it sometimes from a human perspective. In both senses of possible meaning. It both looks as though we as a species throw away all the chances we have to get back on a better track AND that we lay everything in our paths to waste.
That’s a very negative spin of course. Some would take the same big picture information and come up with a much more positive way of looking at things.
I vacillate between the two points of views depending on the day in question. What I don’t change my mind about anymore, is the absence of inevitable outcomes. The possibilities, though not endless, are never the less extremely varied. It could all go in a whole host of directions, and anybody who tries to prophecy the future is very much a hostage to fortune. It’s a mugs game.
We are in an exciting novel of our own making. We don’t know the ending. But we do get the chance to write a few lines ourselves. Lines that will have an affect on the outcomes. Though not ones that we can control.
Never the less, I’d prefer not to waste the small opportunities I do get to be an active player in the story.
Weaver’s Bay
An unwanted journey.
So my friend Les Oman had a lyric called Weaver’s Bay. A powerful, evocative, and very sad tale about the forced evacuations of approximately 150,000 Scottish people from the land they knew as home to the United States and Canada. It is one of those stories that is little spoken about outside of Scotland, and might may help some people (people like me, for instance, as an English fella living here) to understand a little better the antipathy many Scots felt and still often feel towards the old neighbour England - its fellow member of what is generously known as the United Kingdom.
These things, rightly or wrongly, get into the blood for generations.
Anyway the lyric felt related at the time to the collection of songs we were writing about the happenings over the Atlantic, in the shape of a certain Mr Trump. He himself grew up in the USA because of his mother’s emigration from the isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides.
Les had got a tune for the song, but didn’t like it and asked me to have a crack. I was happy with the subsequent result, and so was he. Which is maybe a lesson in keeping hold of material that has something going for it, even if it feels incomplete.
So, as I said previously, I’m avoiding politics these days, but that doesn’t mean it goes away….
Everything On Gold
To the loser goes the spoils!
Let’s celebrate the losers!
Which is most of us all of the time, and all of us some of the time.
We could, and some do, live a life putting Everything On Gold. Which, by it’s very definition, even if we reach the gold standard, means working our whole lives, every day, towards that one moment in the future when we’re top of the pile. It means putting our goal before other people. It has to be our only focus.
To become a winner will take everything we have. And being one can be a very short lived experience.
But alternatively, we can have fun, be kind to each other, work at things we enjoy, relax. Live for now. Like the losers do.
Perhaps those two possibilities aren’t completely mutually exclusive.
But if you’re a loser, you’re in good company. Hello to you all!
Discover Fee And A Betting Man
Ranches And Mansions
“The wall they built, to keep us out is keeping us in”.
There are some pretty impressive walls here in Campbeltown. Some of them are in our garden. Tall, strong, and built without cement. They’re not going anywhere.
Walls are a necessary feature of life. Our body is full of cells, and every cell has a wall. Quite ingenious walls that keep bad things out and let good things through. In both directions.
In fact we all build walls in day to day life. As individuals and nations. A borderless world and a borderless life are both pretty impossible. We need them. But we often tend to focus on the “Keep Out” part of the equation.
Even castle walls though, built for safety and protection, need to be like human cells to a certain degree: letting things and people in and out. Because a good wall should be permeable. In both directions. As well as strong.
This Strunts song, Ranches And Mansions, is the story of a wall that as well as keeping people out, also keeps people locked in. There’s such a thing as a bad wall. Wall building is an ancient craft, and it’s hard to do it well.
Discover Fee In Front Of An Impermeable Wall
Too Much Of Everything
What goes around comes around.
As much as possible I stay away from politics at the moment. I’ve been in that frame of mind for a while. When I wrote this song a few years ago, Too Much Of Everything, as part of an album I made of that title with my friend Les Oman, it was perhaps the beginning of that feeling.
Anyway, ironically, that album was large inspired by the rise of Donald Trump over in the USA. And it could well be that, in a few days, we’ll be right back where we started.
As I say, I’m not paying too much attention. My head can’t cope with it. And to be honest, I think that one of the best things we can do for the world as individuals is to make sure that our own mental wellbeing is as healthy as possible.
We can be believing all the right things, doing all the right things, saying all the right things, but if we’re miserable, we’re going to make the people around us unhappy too. Miserable people tend to make for a miserable world.
Les and I bumped into each other a couple of days ago, funnily enough beside the cashpoint in Campbeltown where our first album began in the form of a conversation we had back then. The subject of a new album came up. The possibility that there was going to be (already is to be honest) more than enough material to sing about.
I don’t know how I feel about it. I don’t know if I can engage with the subject matter enough. A lot less of everything in life has been my line of direction, and maybe that could be a starting point for something. We’ll see.
Discover Fee Feeling Overwhelmed
ps. and here’s the album
Angus
The Green King
Angus, Grandson No. 2, is so called after his mums maiden name.
We all put a lot of weight on a name. And passing on the family name (through male offspring in most cultures) is seen as a big deal.
Plenty of folk, can’t, don’t or won’t, pass on their surname though. Either they don’t get married or have a partner, or they are infertile, or they only have girls, or they choose not to have children, or they adopt. Many don’t get the chance for the particular privilege of nominal longevity.
I walk through the graveyard every other morning when in Campbeltown, and repeatedly see what happens to every single name that gets passed on. It gradually fades upon the facade of a gravestone, and like everything and everyone, it eventually gets forgotten. Most of the graves have not got a single flower in remembrance.
Whatever we do to leave our stamp on the world, it will all pass or fade away sooner or later
It’s easy for me to be blase about all of this obviously. I’ve got five Fee sons, and five Fee grandchildren. So something is getting passed on. Never the less, it’s not something I hold great store in anymore. I’m just going to enjoy and get to know Angus, and all the people whom I am related to, or know and love, as much as possible while I and they are able.
Everything else is like the misty, drizzly clouds outside the window, which will soon blow away to reveal a new face to the world.
Indian Summer
On a dreich day
Unexpected sunshine.
That is the promise of an Indian Summer - the song of that title is another co-write, this time with Gary Carey - a few days of sunbathing at a moment in the year when we were expecting everything to turn a little bit dreich. Today it is dreich. But when the sunshines unexpectedly it is an undoubted bonus. A surprise. It literally warms our souls.
However, I’m trying to approach life without any expectations right now. And to accept the good and the bad with equanimity. That’s a lot of lifetime habits to undo. Ones filled full with hopes, expectations, and a very definite and quite reasonable preference for good over bad. My definitions of course. But usually involving wanting the weather to be different than it is.
So all of that expectation is still very much a part of me. In-built. That’s OK.
But it’s nice, these days, to be not so completely dependent, for the state of my mood, upon the vagaries of the climate, or any of the multitude of variables in life of which I have no control.
At least some of the time.
Discover Fee Basking In The Sun
Miss You When You Go
True.
Back in the day, I loved the most well known song by The Flaming Lips, Do You Realise, on first hearing. It captures the brevity and beauty of life with such lovely poignancy - by, among other things, stating the bleeding obvious - “Do you realise that everyone you know someday will die”.
I had never heard anybody say anything like that before. I think it made me feel less weird about my own love affair with staring hard truths in the face with as much honesty and open-ness as I could muster. Perhaps it wasn’t such a crazy thing to do, after all. Maybe it could actually be a helpful and positive way of approaching life.
Miss You When You Go is a song that continues in that tradition. This one was a co-write with my songwriting friend Dave Harris. I’ve hardly ever played it, and listening to it now makes me want to relearn it. Which I’m going to do as soon as I finish today’s blog.
OK, I’m done.
Discover Fee Missing You In Advance
Potatoman
A mash up.
Potatoman is an early song, that has stayed the course, somehow attracted attention, been shouted out as a nickname to me in the street by strangers, and is generally one with which I have a lot of affinity.
I still haven’t recorded a version that captures it for me yet though. It feels like a band song, that never the less has always worked best until now, I think, when I’ve bashed it out all lonesome…just me and my acoustic geetar
If you’ve not heard it before there are no potatoes in the song. Sorry to disappoint. The chorus got misheard once at my very first gig, and the misheard title stuck.
But for the record, I do like potatoes.
Discover Fee Praying
Forty Two
Do the maths!
In 2007 I was Forty Two. That was about three years after I’d stopped smoking, so the old lungs were still in recovery mode no doubt. I’ve just looked through my photos to get a picture of what was happening back then -
- that year we got a visit in Campbeltown from Australia by a wonderful man called Mikel Azure who I had got to know online, in the early days when the idea of developing friendships via that method was quite unusual. (We are still in touch via that horrific Facebook thing, which I have actually come to hate using these days, coz its famous Algorithms don’t know shit about shit).
And coming back to the present? Well, as I recently reported, one of my foster sons has also been visited this year by his girlfriend in America. That relationship developed online too, and is still going strong. He’s planning to visit her next year.
Plus ca change!
Everything does look very different today of course. The changes that had begun back even before the early Noughties, have sped up exponentially, and are now feeding with complete abandon off our willing supplied online data steroids. All part of a completely unplanned plan to take us to some unknown, and possibly unwelcome, destination. It’s gonna be a ride folks.
In the meantime I’m reading a book (The Way Home by Mark Boyle) about a fella in Ireland who eschewed every single form of modern technology (including electricity) in a life experiment that is far from the mere grand gesture of “Look at me being different!” Rather, it’s a very genuine and impressive examination of our modern world through the lens of a life fully lived, as though the modern world, to as large degree as can be imagined, didn’t exist. In the process he discovers physical community in a place where physical community is just about hanging on. He makes and grows everything by hand. He lives by the sun rather than a clock. And he writes the book with a good old fashioned pencil and paper, posting (snail posting!) the results to his editor.
Of course even that world is effected by modern life. His letters travel by the miracle of combustible engine for instance. But it’s a refreshing and challenging read which I recommend as a way of at least getting a clearer perspective, a little bit above and beyond the confusion which seems to be affecting us all to a lesser or greater degree.
Of course the answers to life, and how we should live it, and if we can carry on living it, are multiple and complex. There is no final answer to everything.
Well…apart from the Forty Two one, announced a few years back by Deep Thought, with a little help from Douglas Adams, after seven and a half million years of, um, deep thought.
Anyway, excuse me, I’m off to destroy the printing presses, throw my Laptop into hell fire, and stand bravely before the throne of Ai to announce my resignation from the land of the barely living.
Ach, no I’m not. This is the only stab at life we get, and I’m going to eke out every last morsel of preciousness I can from the privilege, albeit very haphazardly and imperfectly.
Life was a very messy process seventeen years ago, and nothing has really changed.
Plus ca change! Je ne regrette rien!
Discover Fee Singing By Numbers
Shine On You
And you.
You know how it is. It’s all me, me, me on this blog. Understandably, to an extent, as there is a Me writing it.
But how are you doing?
Are you feeling good - suffering - experiencing difficult problems - cruising along - feeling doubt - struggling with a relationship - looking forward to something - wishing you could be somewhere else - hoping for an answer - bored - in pain - tired - content?
Maybe all of the above, at various times.
Well, I hope with all my heart, that today, or someday soon, the sun (which in this instance is a metaphor for lots of good things like peace of mind, joy, contentment, satisfaction, elation, health, and freedom) will Shine On You.
Thank you very much for taking time out of your day, whether just today or on a regular basis, for paying attention to these words I mess around with.
Discover Fee Going Heavy On The Reverb
Suspicious
Very.
There’s a song called Art Lover that Ray Davies of The Kinks wrote back in the day. It’s a beautiful, sad little song, and it initially got banned by the Beeb.
Reason being it sounded, well, Suspicious. The lyric seems to be speaking about a predatory man watching young girls in a park. But in fact it was a song about divorced fathers who didn’t have access to their children and were simply experiencing, in the presence of other children, the memories of something that had been taken from them. Ray Davies intentionally kept the lyric ambiguous, even provocative, not revealing the true meaning, and leaving the song open to the controversy it caused.
I loved the Kinks and I loved that song. Look it up and give it a listen.
I think I might have had that one in mind when I wrote todays blog title tune.
Because things are often not how they seem. We get wrong signals and impressions all the time. These days we are bombarded, if we choose to be, with a vast multitude of images and stories about everyone and everything. Many of them are, at the very least, misleading. Sadly we often act on those first impressions. It’s human nature.
But getting to know anybody or anything takes time. There are no shortcuts.
Discover Fee In The Dark After Midnight
Sauly
A better story.
I wrote Sauly for my oldest grandson when he was two.
Part of the chorus lyric goes:
”Sauly, Sauly, Sauly you can tell a better story than we did
You should dream big, yeah”.
I saw Saul, now nine, at the weekend, and I can tell you that he is a very smart and delightful young man, very curious about the world, caring, active and engaging. I’m a proud Opa.
I’m also glad to report that the song of his name is on his Spotify playlist. Along with a very interesting and eclectic selection of music.
He also seems to be paying heed to the lyric of the song, and dreaming big.
For instance, he was telling me enthusiastically about his plans to be the 13th man to walk on the moon. Or, alternatively, the first one to walk upon Mars. Although, he did have a few reservations about the latter idea, on the understandable grounds that apparently it would take 18 months to get there.
Well, plenty of time to listen to all my tunes anyway, I hope. And read a few books too.
It would be great if I could be around to see it all happen. Either way, I hope his dreams, whether these or fresh ones, all come true.
He’s already making mine a reality
Discover Fee Getting Soulful About Saul
Fog
Nothing there.
Every songwriter has a different angle from which they write. I’ve always been a very emotional person, and I think my angle has often been to capture the sense of that emotion, whatever it might be. When, as has been the case for a lot of my songwriting career, the emotions are of a darker nature then that tends to find its way into the songs.
Looking back through the years, there is a fair bit of melancholy in the music and lyrics I made, even though I often attempted to break out of that mould. But people identify with songs of all shapes and sizes, and the darker songs can often help folk who are experiencing that darkness to feel less alone.
Fog is a song that captures a particular kind of emotion. That moment on the wrong side of despair in everything. Yourself and the world. But there is nothing inside you to feel anything anymore. I’m proud of this song because it does capture that. And the recording is one of my favourites from my whole archive.
These days I’m less bound up in the maelstrom of emotional flood tides. It’s a lot happier place to be. But I still haven’t written the kind of song that encapsulates a pure sense of joy. A song that is the opposite of Fog. Maybe I haven’t got that kind of song in me. At least yet. But I hope to write it one day.
Discover Fuh-fuh-fuh- Fee
It’s A Beautiful Game
Well, it could be.
It’s A Beautiful Game.
And because it’s a game, we have the freedom to enjoy it. To eke out all the possibilities it presents without fear of reprisal. To a certain extent we get to choose who we play with. And though in some ways we get what we’re given, we also get to make our own rules. Lots of freedom. And a fair degree of responsibility.
I like the phrase “first do no harm” that originates from ancient Greek medical practises. It strikes me as a useful first rule to apply to life. Our own life, the lives of others, and the life of the planet we live on.
But because there is no external rule giver (even the rules that are allegedly provided by a God seem to have the very clear stamp of human interference) people can choose to do harm. Many do. We all do at some point or other.
So maybe it’s truer to say that it could be a beautiful game. For everyone.
Perhaps the aim of the game might be to create that beauty.
Discover Fee Going Out In The Rain
Jack Sorrow
Meets Death.
I made the character of Jack Sorrow up.
Death already existed.
That’s how creativity works. Taking existing materials, adding invented ideas, and mixing things up to make something new. In this case a song about accepting our limitations. Specifically our physical finitude.
I’m sorry to have to break that to you.
ps. I completely forgot in yesterdays blog that I had anglicised the spelling of some of the dutch words. This will mean that, if you tried, you would have struggled with the translation thing. The correct spelling is “Geen koe die koken kan”
Kan Koo Di Koken Kan
Puzzled? You will be.
WTF!!!! I hear you think.
”Kane Koo Di Koken Kan”?????
Don’t panic. It was just a bit of song writing fun I had a few years ago with a phrase that popped up in a Dutch lesson.
But you want to know what it means now, don’t you? Well that’s what your AI chat bot is for! Or the Google search engine if you’re old school. Mwaahah.
Don’t build your hopes up too much though. It won’t change your life. But knowledge is power, they say. So … you probably should find out.
Go on. Make my day. Random searches can take you anywhere or nowhere. But everywhere is somewhere.
ps. S’cuse me. I’m giggling to myself. I’d forgotten how much I enjoy writing complete nonsense occasionally.
pps. “Not so occasionally” I hear you whisper
ppps. The answer below please. Extra points for making a limerick out of the translation.
Bag For Life
A final request.
”They don’t make them like that anymore” said the actress to the bishop.
And we know exactly what she means. Built To Last!
Our modern version of the concept? Allow me to introduce the Bag For Life. Yes, you too sir can carry all your precious, disposable junk, home from the shops in a carrier bag that will possibly outlast its contents.
I say ”Possibly”. Because as well as throwing crap away, we seem to have developed the habit of stretching the meaning of some words. In this care the words “for life”. Yes, I’ve had to send the odd “bag for life” to baggy heaven. With the bishops blessing of course. You may have had to do the same.
Everything comes to an end. But it would be nice not to rush there so fast.
The Moon Will Be Big Tonight
Somewhere.
It appears.
It disappears.
It’s always there.
It stays the same.
It changes shape.
It changes size.
It changes tides.
It shines.
It reflects.
It obscures.
It is lifeless.
It has been visited by life.
It is a god.
It is made of cheese.
The cow jumped over it.
Yes, The Moon Will Be Big Tonight.
Somewhere. And depending upon the viewers perception.
Discover Fee Sitting On A Balcony