Heaneyland!

My baby, she wrote me a letter (and it had a lot of internal rhymes for some reason)

Despite my unfortunate combination of being both lazy and overworked, I do manage to work on my own projects every now and then. This weekend I finished recording a new song, and it has an odd genesis, so let me backtrack to a few months ago, when I bought the Kirsty MacColl 3-CD set, "From Croydon to Cuba". (And see how I'm not linking to Amazon this time? That's because Amazon's price for it is crap.)

The set is one of those collections that irks me slightly even though I could not possibly live without it. I need to own it because it is packed with rarities that aren't available anywhere else, but it annoys me because it is also filled with album tracks that are taking up space which could be filled with more rare tracks.

One of the rarities is entitled "Dear John", and it's the last song on the second disc. As with all the rarities, I was looking forward to hearing it -- but every time I listened to the disc, I would simultaneously be doing something else (working at the computer, reading), and by the time the CD ended, I would realize that I hadn't really been paying any attention to the last five or six songs at least. And our crappy CD player can be fussy about skipping tracks, so I wouldn't bother trying to replay the CD and skip to the last track.

After this happened more than once, I thought, well, maybe I should just write what I think a Kirsty MacColl song called "Dear John" would sound like. So I did. It is, of course, nothing at all like hers (which is slow, and sad, and which she considered too personal to put on the album she was working on; she ended up giving it to Eddi Reader to record), but I'm still very happy with how it came out. I was going to have Rose do the vocals, but I decided I liked having it sung in a guy's voice, because that makes the song feel like it's simultaneously giving the point of view of the woman doing the dumping and the point of view of the guy being dumped. So, here you go: "Dear John".