Bedroom Versions: ‘Heartbreaker’

Before I get into this week’s song, a quick content notice: there’s discussion of several recent high-profile cases of emotionally abusive and bigoted behaviour below the cut.

Bedroom Versions: ‘Back Buchanan Street’

It can be so hard to contemplate what the places we know best were like before they were those places, or what they’ll be like after.

Bedroom Versions: ‘Another Failed Song For Rosie’

Ah, the follies of youth.

Bedroom Versions: ‘Galveston’

I try not to be one of those types who fetishise the Sixties. I’m not old enough to have lived through them, but I am old enough – just – to remember when the critical consensus held that music stopped being good roughly forty minutes after the release of Abbey Road. It took me a long time to get out of that mindset myself, but these days I’m quite happy to admit that my music collection is better for not being constrained by the mores of artists working twenty-five years before I was born.

That said – and I am willing to be convinced as regards my next point – I don’t think there’s ever been a combination of songwriter and performer as magical as Jimmy Webb and Glenn Campbell.

Bedroom Versions: ‘Exodus Train’

There’s nothing on earth like the Edinburgh Fringe. I should know; I wrote a show about it. I was supposed to be going back there in August, three whole weeks spent singing my heart out in a vegan cafe just off the Meadows.

Are You Happy Now? – Bedroom Version

Yet another new arrangement for this video; my new tripod fits neatly on the side of my headboard, thus allowing me to display more of the actual backdrop I’ve painstakingly created and less of the underside of my wall cabinets.

However, this also means that my microphone is now closer to the wall behind, with all the attendant issues that brings – if you’re wondering why this video is wonky, or why I flub a line in the second verse, it’s because I spent a good amount of time getting a much better performance of this song only to find afterwards that the audio was comb-filtered to hell. The finished article is a result of me initiating a hasty bodge and using the very next take I got, to spare both my own sanity and that of my family. But, y’know, I’ve had worse performances recorded for posterity.

‘Handstand ‘Cross The Land’ – Bedroom Version

I tend to think I’m not good at collaboration. I’ve built a compositional style around my own limitations, and I don’t possess the musical nous to go beyond that; I’m also deferential to a fault, so keen to avoid fucking up that I become incapable of actually doing interesting.

And then there’s this song.

‘As Time Goes By’ – Bedroom Version

Max Steiner, composer for Casablanca, never wanted to use ‘As Time Goes By’. The song was simply a stand-in while something more appropriate was found, at which point the appropriate scenes would have been re-shot; except that Ingrid Bergman’s next film required her to have a drastically different haircut, one that made recreating Ilsa Lund’s demure perm impossible. Steiner, stuck with having to work around this corny song, evidently decided to make it the cornerstone of the entire score instead; the rest, as they say, is history.