Jude Davison: Stories

I've picked up this blog thread just lately - since I've re-vamped my website in readiness for the new album - I somehow lost the blog capacities last year when I added videos to my website?! But magically the blog has appeared again - strange! Computers . . .So I'm picking it up again - will finish the "Circo" songs and then move onto "Outskirts" . . .
Anyhow . . .I wrote Monkey See later in the album process - I guess I was just on a roll. Not sure this one has much to do with the "Circus" theme (monkeys???), but the song turned out alright so was kept in the mix. Every now and then songs pop out of my subconscious that seem to speak to more universal themes - I guess this is one of them. I always think - what the hell was I trying to say there? And then some time later I get it. I like when that happens. The worst songs are the ones where I can hear myself trying real hard and sounding so overwrought (some may say pretentious??). Nice horns on this one. When we do it live I have the [...]

This song just kinda fell into my lap. I think I had the title first. Its about a ghost who comes every night to her lover's room - but being a ghost I guess they can't really consummate the affair. So the song really is about desire and longing. Beautiful trumpet solo by Tim. When we do this live we have Sydney dancing with a veil - lit so you just see her as a silhouette.

We have a nice event that happens here in Nelson every year called "Trash to Treasure" day. Any unwanted, used, or broken things we want to recycle we put out on the sidewalk for others to pick over and take away as "treasure". When I grew up in England I remember that we had a similar thing only it was called the Rag & Bone man. He would drive round the streets with his horse and cart yelling "rag & bone" and we would bring out all our unwanted things for him to recycle. I realized that when I was writing this next song that the Rag & Bone concept would make a nice metaphor for the sideshow freaks that inhabit our circus world. These folks would maybe be unwanted, broken-down, certainly different to regular folks, but put together in a show they become "treasures" for the paying customers to go and see. This became the song "Rag & Bone". Once again, I called upon Craig to lay down a nice banjo track, which got that nice swampy thang going on again. It was a fun song to record - we probably [...]

This was a fun song to write! It's always good to crack out the electric guitars and rock out once in a while. Came together pretty easily - the horns where a natural fit to give it a bit of swing in the groove - the boys did a great job. Rick smoked on the solo too! Not too sure how it actually fits into the "circus" theme, but it seems to share some sort of commonality. All the songs on this album were written as a group, and in a really short time frame (about a month) - so there must be something that relates them together. Great live song. Nothing too deep in the lyrics, just some wild girls out for a wild time - how the carnival girls let of steam perhaps! There ya go . . .

At this point of writing the album I was quite immersed and committed to the "Mexican" thing. I wanted to do something in Spanish. I remember listening to the Cocteau Twins years ago and always was intrigued by the fact that she didn't sing real words. It sort of sounded like like words but if you listened closely you could tell she was just singing gibberish. It was cool though and certainly didn't detract from the emotional impact of the music. For myself (not speaking Spanish at all) I didn't want to write some words and then have to translate them and then try to fit that back into the melody of the song. So I tore a page out of the Cocteau Twins regime and decided to just make up my own "Spanish-sounding" language. This was a bit of an experiment for me and I must say I found it quite liberating to just find the melody I wanted without being attached to specific words. Anyhow the result is Con Volai Amore. I had also decided, by the way the song was emerging, to have Sydney sing it. [...]