Miss A

With our three albums going digital this Friday – they can then all be heard on Spotify – I thought I would revisit each song in turn, album by album, writing a few words about each track. Such a retrospective means that I’m listening back with fresh ears to songs we wrote and recorded many years ago.

‘Miss A’ is the first track on our first album In Between which we released in 2002. We start in the manner of a full-on all-orchestra tune up, before Gorwel’s delicate guitar emerges from that maelstrom and the song begins.

Every poem or song has a trigger, a way into the words, and in this song, it was losing our much-loved dog of fourteen years, Alice. We had lost dogs before, of course, but this was the death that woke me to the absolute finality of death that we are impotent against. Yet, as the Spring arrived, I couldn’t help but feel the way nature symbolises a sense of return, of inscrutable mystery, of life’s giving and renewal. The lyrics grew from the wisful poignancy I heard in Gorwel’s playing along with losing Alice – or anyone near and dear.

As American poet Chase Twichell says regarding her ‘rules’ for writing poems: “Tell the truth. No decoration. Remember death.”

Lyrics

How far you are from me

Though maybe closer than I can see

Sometimes I sense you there

Now that the Spring begins its stir

Your bloom

Is forget-me-not blue

You can hear the track here.