Author Archives: BJD

How do we cope with not fully meeting our aspirations in life? Being able to box up disappointment and regret is one solution but sometimes others might glimpse what is in that box.

Song a Week 22 Week 13: Learning my blues scales I played around and then wrote this quirky lyric about being swept away with a drunk ferryboat captain. Saved from a long journey to a fabled land overseas by a mermaid, I am returned to the beach. This version with new vocal and slightly shortened in 2022.

I asked Joe, a friend who is also a semi-pro musician, how you could make money out of songwriting. He said, “Write a Christmas hit.” It was August but I had a crack at it. It is about the office party.

This is about abandonment at the break up of a relationship but it is interwoven with an idea of being lost at sea. The concept of the verses being letters only arose when I made the video.

I do like progressive rock but am a long way off playing it, so this was composed and forged from samples. I had been reading ‘Who We Are and How We Got Here’ by David Reich. The piece is in part about our origins but it also echoes modern migration. The core themes are population growth and diversity based upon common ancestry.

This is the second song that I wrote and performed, with Peter on guitar and bass. 2018 was the worst year for school mass shootings in the USA and Trump fronted the NRA convention. I grew up with American films and music. Suddenly it seemed to me that the American dream had become a nightmare.

Taking the title from the film about Churchill and World War II, this is a protest song about abuse of power and the absence of ethical leadership in nation states. It seems that we fail to learn from history as we loop around the mistakes of the first half of the twentieth century all over again.

Written as we approached 100 days of Coronavirus/Covid-19 lockdown in the UK. I tried to capture a series of images as lines in the song and wrap them in a chorus about the absence of touch in the virtual world and the cost of getting back to normal.