Hi
A month back I was introducing Keep Me Around on stage, doing my thing, you know the one, about how it’s a flaws-and-all grown-up kind of love song that acknowledges the struggle as well as the romance. It’s probably a bit of a shtick at this point. Anyway I noticed a subtle pang like something was off, but I wasn’t quite sure what.
Around that time I’d been craving mainstream escapist crime fiction and started reading Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club. There’s a running theme in that book of elderly people whose lives are quietly driven by profound love born of absolutely decades of excellent marriage. While not really foregrounded, it runs so deep in the characters it permeates everything they are, making them do all kinds of mundane things and even the occasional extreme thing which you need a bit of in mainstream escapist crime fiction.
My hunch is I was feeling a bit of a discord between my song about the day-to-day and these characters I’d been engrossed in who always seemed to have one foot in some unspoken eternal.
A few days later I was working on a song about dancing in the kitchen and it happened again. The unspoken eternal voice was finding it all a bit flimsy.
So I grabbed a line from the kitchen dancing song - And the last time I checked - and started building a new song around it, something from that other perspective. It seemed to resist keeping to a tempo so I took it off the grid which could be a genius link on my part to the whole eternal / beyond time thing or could be a complete coincidence (definitely the former). Lyrics draw upon the unchanging imagery of nature and the drunken, unapologetic, unqualified love like you tend to find in novels and, if you’re really lucky, when you get home from work.
Here’s a first take live video of it. I’m pretty sure with the right studio production it will land even better, but that’s a task for another day.
Any comments? Songs don’t really make sense to me until I share them and see how people react. Often my sense is a little off one way or the other, and in need of a little adjustment, so I’d welcome your thoughts behind the button below.
It took quite a few weeks for these lyrics to settle, even now I’m doing little tweaks, so I want to offer a huge thanks to all of my paid subscribers who support me on this platform. Your subscriptions directly help me write songs I might otherwise not be able to write. Thank you and again thank you. Usually I only send these demos to the paid group, but I figure maybe I should send some to everyone? I felt quite inspired by this ‘Unlocking the Commons’ idea in another newsletter I follow where a small number of people collectively pay for the creation of something that everyone else gets to enjoy for free.
Who knows, not me, I’m gonna get back to that kitchen song.
Thanks always for listening,
Love
Jake
Audio if you prefer that
The Last Time I Checked (live demo)
The Last Time I Checked (live demo with loop intro)
Lyrics
And the last time I checked
Leaves flutter in the wind
And the last time I checked
Summer follows the spring
Newborn babies cry
There’s somebody on my mind
A heavy haze I’m looking through
And the last time I checked
It was you, my love
It was you
And the last time I checked
Rivers flow on to the sea
And the last time I checked
Sugar is sweet
Love is precious rare
Beauty is everywhere
There’s a light at my window
And the last time I checked
It was you, my love
It was you
And the last time I checked
Apples fall toward the ground
And the last time I checked
I’m happier when you’re around
Fires burn and die
In the morning I open my eyes
There’s a face I’m turning to
And the last time I checked
It was you, my love, it was you
It was you
It was you
Demo: The Last Time I Checked