Last May, during the first lockdown, the weather was glorious. Each day I’d sit in the garden, enjoying a coffee in the sunshine and listening to the music of the birds as they enjoyed the freedom denied to us. A song emerged, I put it on one of my daily Facebook performances. That led to an invitation to perform it on a TV show and then I put it away. The question of recording it didn’t arise – the priority was to finish the Ageing With Attitude album and I certainly didn’t think a song about lockdown would remain relevant for long.
But here we are. Last month I returned to the song, and invited Rob Molumby to do some work on the arrangement. Before long we were in Hellfire Studios where, over the course of one socially-distanced eight-hour session, we recorded the song with additional harmonies from Ellen O’Mahony and Martin McDonnell. Mick Heffernan helmed the desk as always and Peter Salisbury was on hand to capture the moment on video.
“There will come a time when all of this will end…. we can be together, we can live our lives again….we’ll break these chains and climb these prison walls and find our way….. to any other world where this would be a perfect day”. Any Other World is a song of hope. These are desperate times but they’ll pass and, when they do, we’ll appreciate all the more the simple things that we always took for granted until suddenly they were gone. Live music being an example that comes to mind!
Any Other World is available on all download and streaming platforms. It secured my third No 1 placing on the iTunes Singer-Songwriter chart on its day of release.