Annotations: Hey William

Here's what I said AGES ago, when I first recorded this one for Zipcodes:

This song started life as a jingle for the Claire Dicko show on Kooba radio, although it doesn't really sound like it any more. That tune arrived in my brain and got sent off pretty sharpish, but I liked the tune a lot, so decided to keep it, and started writing a song called "hey (someone)" with various people's names placed in the title, although it never really went much further than that.

Cut to a couple of weeks later, when I got an email from Mr Dan Bayliss from Worcester way, who asked if I fancied writing a song for his lad - he's 14 months old, and likes listening to our records, especially at bedtime. He admitted it was an odd request, but said "it occurs to me that is the slightly odd sort of think you might do."

He was right! I ruminated over this for a while, then realised that the "hey..." song could very easily be "hey William" and... Er... Didn't get much further than the first couple of lines after that. That was, until this weekend just gone when I found myself feeling a bit poorly and in control of a guitar, and lo! The song emerged over the course of a couple of hours. It did waver in the direction of morbidity at one point (lots of stuff about how said child would see many things after the narrator was dead) but I thought that might possibly not be the best sort of thing for a toddler at bedtime, so steered it back, and surprised myself with the rather jolly way it ends.

I meant to save this song for The Validators to record, but when I started doing Zipcodes I decided to have a go at it myself. I like the way it turned out, but I feel that one day it deserves to have a full band recording...

... well, it didn't QUITE get that. I really REALLY wanted to have another go at this one and started off with a pretty STANDARD version on just guitar, which I passed on to Mr Tom McClure for ORCHESTRATION. While he was doing that I went a bit bonkers in the middle section with VOCALS and rather heavily effects laden keyboards, which made it a bit WEIGHED DOWN in the centre, as everything else was quite NORMAL. I tried to do a bit of UKELELE PICKING at the start but it just sounded CLUNKY so i thought I'd get an EXPERT in to do it, and asked Mr Phil Wilson if he'd mind having a go.

I also had a couple of goes at percussion, but couldn't get anything programmed to work, so after doing the TRIANGLE in the middle section by hand using my keyboard's DRUMS setting I went back and did the whole thing on BASS and SNARE drums on that! It sounds OK to me - and they say drumming is HARD! PAH!

A little while later Tom's violins came in and were GORGEOUS - i was EXTREMELY pleased with what he'd done, especially that bit at the end where the strings come back in again, i think that's LOVELY. When i got Phil's BANJO and MANDOLIN added in it all sounded like a BIT MUCH to take in in one go, which is why they don't come in until the second verse - i felt really BAD about mixing them out like that, as there was some GRATE stuff in there, but i think bringing them in a bit later makes it all BUILD really nicely. It still sounded like there was SOMETHING that should be at the start tho, so i did that plinky piano bit.

By now there was SO MUCH going on that the middle bit didn't seem any more jam-packed than anywhere else, and i had a BRILLIANT time doing all the cross fades and PANNING on this one. There is a LOT going on, especially near the end when the triangle, backing vocals, and ALIEN NOISES drift back in for a while, but hopefully it sounds OF A WHOLE. It may not be the whole band recording I'd originally hoped for, but BY HECK it's not exactly an UNPLUGGED performance!o