timbrooksmusic-blog

[timbrooksmusic-blog]

Hijack the Summer

“There’s just one thing that’s clear to me, no-one dies with dignity, we just try to avoid the elephant somehow” Jason Isbell-Elephant. 

Story time. 

Late October 2015. Halloween haze in the air. Those fucking amazing cinder toffee cakes in the stores (I stocked up on maybe what 10 packs of these...)

After a whirlwind of bitter feelings and jealousy, I put the nail in the coffin of a 2 year relationship, and the reason I was in Hitchin in the first place. Neither of us could afford to move out of Lyon Court, so we co-habitated and stewed in the same flat for an extended period of 6 months after the death knell was sounded. 

That’s just the background though. There are other songs on this!! 

The underlying point is how shit I was feeling. Then someone came along, an artist, as predicted by all the shitty cliches (never gonna find it if you’re looking for it...rings true Bert), and teleported me from the airbed in our front room and nightly shouting matches, and back to Cambridge. 

First dates with people normally consist of me hoping I can get away with being sarcastic and then panicking if I can’t, but the truth is on this one, we both came in with a bag of bones from our respected closets. 

For me, the whole living with my now ex situation was a deep red flag in my mind, but she had a one up. Her dad, ill with cancer, the inspiration for her career choice, and someone she called every day, two collective elephants in one collective room. 

Whilst that was a shadow throwing shapes for a fair few months, things were good, like really good. She was the epitome of chill (not totally sure how..), and lured me to the spires of Cambridge, away from claustrophobia and drama etc etc etc. 

 And then May

We’d booked a trip to Barcelona. This city is the greatest. Gaudi etc etc etc. I have hardly scratched the surface of the earth in terms of travel (this will change, give me some years, and a pocket for my fears, this will change), but of my limited destinations, it remains the greatest. 

Throughout the wretches of spring I’d of course received a regular update on family progress. It was obvious deterioration, but on such a slow moving, angular level. Remember that line from the Dark Knight from Harvey Dent, “...have you ever had to tell someone it’s OK, even when you know it’s not?” That. A lot of that. 

A week or two beforehand, she had a drop everything moment. Pneumonia she said....She moved her entire life back to Newcastle, every day, all that had gone before blurred. She fainted at the hospital I’m told...The hero she’d grown up with, but not as she remembered. 

There’s 250 miles between Stevenage and Newcastle, and I felt every single fucking one of those. 

May 12th. A simple Facebook message. Remarkable in it’s conciseness. 5 days prior to jetting off. He’d gone.  

Rather than sacrifice a trip, I went alone. 

There’s a set of abandoned bunkers around the centre of the city called the Bunkers Del Carmel. They raise up high above the tower blocks and sculptures, and no words or pointless adjectives will ever do justice;

I’ve always been a bit anti the whole “write a song quickly” thing. I always have suspicion when someone says they have 500 songs (nobody has 500 good songs), but I swear I sat up there by myself with just a setting sun and a city skyline, and wrote down near as makes no difference the final draft in hardly any time at all. 

It’s hard to pin down the full extent of the song, as it’s just an explosion of where my head was at the time. “It’ll be alright, it’ll be OK, I’ll find a way, I’ll find a way” Someone I really cared about was suffering, and to be honest, I was just etching for a solution to just get things back to the way they were, to fix the situation, not me or her. 

How many times have people wished for that eh. 

The title “Hijack the Summer” is taken from a Kerrang! magazine review of “Dusk and Summer” by Dashboard Confessional. The tagline was “How to Hijack the Summer in 40 minutes”. That still sticks. That album still means being young, naive, drunk, reckless, in love etc etc, it represents low-sun evenings where the air is still warm. Exactly as it was on top of those hills. Dusk and Summer. 

The line “The ocean’s full of diamonds” is a simplified version of the opening stanza of Wish you Were Here by Incubus (the ocean looks like a thousand diamonds, spread across a blue blanket). The line “..here I am above palm trees straight and tall” is adapted from Goodbye Sky Harbour by Jimmy Eat World. 

Other than that, the song is pretty self explanatory, there are no attempts at any fancy bits of wordplay or anything like that. A line like “with our bandannas and our sunglasses and our backs against each other, that time we hijacked the summer” is pretty clunky and, let’s be honest, shit, but it came out in a whirlwind and a flurry of pen on notepad, so it remained. 

Spoiler alert, it didn’t end out ok. This was in fact the start of a whole tornado of emotions and mistrust etc etc, and again, more posts on that in the future, but at the time, the hope was real. 

I may also get in a spot of trouble with this one too... I got told by a friend in 6th form that you can never justify using names in songs, and there’s probably a parallel line somewhere when it comes to writing uber personal blog posts. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t follow any of my platforms though, so we’re safe! 

So yeah..this song isn’t really my best writing, is a bit hammy, and has a clunky lyric right slap bang in the chorus. 

This song however is about something. In the limited timeslots that London gives you in a set, there is not nearly enough in the way of spare seconds to spill my guts on this tale pre song, so erm...now you know I guess. Maybe sometimes the story behind a song eclipses the song itself. 

“There’s just one thing that’s clear to me, no-one dies with dignity, we just try to avoid the elephant somehow” Jason Isbell-Elephant.

The song can be found at the following link

https://soundcloud.com/tim-brooks-290882159/hijack-the-summer

#singersongwriter #music #Barcelona #travel #bunkers 

[timbrooksmusic-blog]

The Ballad of Tim Peake

The one about the spaceman

I’m pretty sure this one was unoriginal in a whole number of ways. I magpied up the concept from all different corners, that’s for sure. 

I know Blink 182 do a song about an astronaut up in space judging whether to go back down (”should I go back, should I go back, should I?”), I think Something Corporate do one as well. Well they do a song called The Astronaut anyway...

Oh and Josh Ritter, genius as he is, did a song about two people in an underground bunker, and how one of them is contemplating starting a nuclear war so they be together in the safety of the underground (”our love would lead a half life on the surface”....I will never write something as clever as that! The DOUBLE MEANINGS!). That was also in my mindset. 

As it turns out, Tim Peake had just been in the news, and I chose him as the character! I’m sure he’s perfectly happy down here in the deep blue, but hey! 

I have stated that this song doesn’t actually have any deep or insightful meaning, and that much is fairly true, it is exactly what it says on the tin, a song about someone taking a bird’s alien’s eye view of the planet, and it’s woes, and how where there is nothing, there can be no chaos. 

To be honest, even in that sentence it makes it sound deeper than it is! I swear one of the bosses in Final Fantasy IX (the last one I think), says a line like “where there is nothing, there is no suffering”. I didn’t get FFIX in there though :(, Matt Damon and the Martian made it though! (It’s a clunky lyrics that I do sorta regret, though not as much as Bahamut in Molotov mind!)

A slight confession booth moment as well, I researched what the first thing Tim Peake ate in outer space was, and it turns out bacon sandwiches and tea fits as snugly in a song as it does in an astro stomach. 

Other references....errrr...oh I managed to get The Weakerthans in there as well. Much as every meal is made better by the addition of bacon (it’s endorsed by astronauts you see!), every song is made better if you sprinkle on some of Winnipeg’s finest. Someone in Brixton commented how they adored the line “build yourself a rocket, out of disused plastic, fuelled on hope and gasoline”, which might sound like me blowing my own trumpet, but that line was adapted from a line in Reconstruction Site by The Weakerthans (”buy me a shiny new machine, that runs on lies and gasoline”), so I can big it up all I like!!

Getting serious for a second though and probably thinking way too much into it, the song references and talks about only seeing division and “barriers and borders”. In the aftermaths of everything that has happened in London recently, I actually didn’t feel comfortable with lines like that when in front of people in the capital. 

That though, is testament to the unity that was in place in London. Every time I sang the lines about division etc, it didn’t seem to ring true at all. 

There you go, Tim Peake got it wrong!  

The moody live version of this song, shot by Shufflewire can be found here;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLFlX4atbi0

#timpeake #song #astronaut #London #ballad #lyrics #meaning #blog 

[timbrooksmusic-blog]

Suddenly

Suddenly and viciously she sets him free and cuts the rope. 

If ever an opening line was to define a song’s raison d’etre, that would be it I guess...

I’ve been jovial about this song at gigs in the past whilst talking about it, about how two of my close friends had a crummy long distance breakup, and I turned it into a song (true friends eh). Maybe it trivialises what was a pretty nasty few weeks I dunno. 

I remember having a truly awful Costa coffee with one of them in the eye of the storm of the situation, and she quoted that episode of How I Met Your Mother, about how everyone goes into long distance things with optimism, whereas it doesn’t work, it never works. 

I guess I’d follow on with “...distance kills the best of intentions..” from Jet Lag by Frank Turner. 

Anyway, the song itself is that wonderful, thing, a breakup song that I didn’t have to go through (see aforementioned trivialising). That way I could see it from both sides. He wanted her to stay. She wanted to go. Verse structure = sorted. 

I don’t know a lot about San Francisco, I heard it’s nice. That’s where she was ultimately ending up. My lack of knowledge is indicated by referring to Lombard Street as Lombard Road, but hey, rhyming couplets and all...

The absolute worst kinda break up is one where something bigger ultimately makes the decision for you. Moving back into the real world for a second, it’s something that’s hit me pretty square in the feels recently (aha we will come to that for sure!). In his eyes, that was 100% the case here, and def what I was trying to portray in both the song’s bridge, and the music video. 

Ah yes, the music video...

So this song had a facelift, and was released as a standalone single in its own right. It was pimped out with bells and whistles, and drums and shiny synths. As of writing this, it remains my only song on spotify, (but not for long!!!). What better way to beef up a song, than with a music video!

I’d always wanted to play on the idea of water/the ocean with this. Maybe the idea of going into the ocean and chasing after someone?!?! 

It always ALWAYS sounds better in your head! 

What I got was a cold, SUBFUCKINGZERO hard lesson into the tidal temps of the British Isles. You can watch the whole video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SR5nwcEZdw . Spoiler alert, me and my friend end up acting out the whole chasing someone into the ocean very very literally (still to this day not sure how I persuaded her!)

Anyway, it’s on 16k views, which is awesome and very humbling! 

So on that note, please keep watching and listening on the various formats. I’m really proud of how it worked out. 

Oh and just in case you’re wondering, both of the individuals in the story clocked straight away that it was about them, and despite initial unease, are both totally cool with me singing about it night after night!!

Soundcloud link;

https://soundcloud.com/tim-brooks-290882159/suddenly-single-version

[timbrooksmusic-blog]

Run Away and Join the Circus

Quite often I’ve described this song as the “first song I ever wrote”. I guess that’s not TECHNICALLY true (I dabbled a bit in uni, there were a few lines here and there), it’s probably the first song I put out there to pubs, clubs and the unwilling public. 

There’s still a video doing the rounds on YouTube of a fantastically awkward early performance, complete with your token wandering soundman, his half arsed duck not quite sufficient to evade the gaze of the camera lens. 

Maybe midway through 2016 was when the whole “becoming a musician” thing turned from a mid 20s crisis, a pipe shaped fantasy, into something thick and tangible. The first steps etc. The whole thing manifested into a change of script. 

About that time, a heated conversation brought about the missing piece. “You’re not a musician, why would you throw everything away just to run away and join the circus!?” 

Bingo

Not so much a change of heart, but a change of script, to alter the ending so to speak. 

I’ve always loved reference heavy lyrics. There used to be a site (I think it still exists) called songmeanings, where people would pick apart lyrics with a fine toothed virtual comb, offering their own interps and what they meant. 

With this song, and this situation. Bourne potentially out of sheer songwriting naivety, I threw the whole lot together into a melting pot, taking a different angle on things, and seeing various characters from a different angle. 

Some obvious, some less so. The line “Elzever Block says Why the hell not!?!” is one of my favourites, and there is no way on this great blue planet that anyone will get the reference. Maybe that’s the marker for “making it”..”heeey I love the Moonfleet reference!”. Best.day.ever.

I guess on reflection, all scripts can be rewritten, even if they are set in stone. This shouldn’t be as much as an epiphany as it was, people change careers all the time hey? It only means a heck of a lot more when you experience it. 

Hey maybe the high note in the chorus (I can hit it now! I went through a phase of wussing out of it!!) is a manifestation of escape!

All in all, it’s one of my favourites to play live. It’s load enough to scare the merry cock out of people who want vacant background acoustic wallpaper paste music, and I feel it encapsulates and justifies me saying such daft things onstage like “..my name’s Tim Brooks, and I play loud shouty acoustic music...”

So yeah, Run Away and Join the Circus. 

The plan with these posts is to do one for each song I write, and I guess the more I write, the more posts will be written (inception). So let me know what ya think, via the twitters facebooks emails youtubes, just some good old fashioned heckling. All comments welcome.