T H E o W E S T E R N o R E A C H

I had just had a very emotional and fantastic evening with an old friend whom I had grown up with in Guinea Bissau, West Africa. He is not playing guitar with Manecas Costa's band and had just done a gig at the Jazz Café in Camden and blown the house away! It made me think of the legacies we always leave behind us and the way life moves and how friendships come and go, I wanted to put this stuff into a song and was reminded of a section of Ullyses, by Alfred Lord Tennyson, that a stranger had written down on a scrap of paper for me after a chance conversation about poetry in a pub in Cambridge.

I woke up one morning with the simple groove and melody in my head and came straight down to the 'studio' and put down the first draft pretty quickly. It took a while to get the lyrics right, but I was excited about it enough to burn a copy for Ian to listen to so he could think about bass lines. I am so grateful to him for his amazing musicianship on this track.. As always, Susie had more brilliant vocal ideas than we could ever use… we decided on quite a sparse backing part which really softens the song, giving it space and making it very much a Note for a Child track - somewhere between The Day and Always. The 7/8 opening and mid section were inspired by Paul Simon's 'The cool, cool river'.

I dedicate this to Laura, Emma and Hannah, my beautiful 'Three Sisters'.D.

2. THE WESTERN REACH by DANIEL GOODMAN

I miss the sound of evening from the safety of our home
Look back upon that time with a smile now I am grown
And in absence of that crimson red earth,
I know that there's a place for me in the land of my birth in you, in you.

All of life is movement though its fast and its slow
Sometimes you hold on tightly and sometimes you let go
Turn and walk away without a heart full of regret
To know that I am part of everything that I have met

The arc of my experience on this un-travelled road
Who's margins fade forever and forever erode
And I am kept from falling by your faithfulness to me
I cannot keep silent about the things that I see in you, in you.

LISTEN to a sample.