POETS Day – Song Writing

I can’t really remember when I wrote this song but I do remember it took me ages!  I’d heard the phrase POETS Day (Piss Off Early Tomorrows Saturday) from working on various building sites.  I was always struck with the poetry of the phrase rubbing up against the harshness of its meaning. Also, I felt that the world was just crying out for a song to be titled POETS Day! 

Turns out it was harder than I thought.  It doesn’t scan very well and the obvious thing to do when writing a song about something is to put that thing at the top of the song…I just couldn’t get started.

So, I left it and kept writing notes about building sites ‘sky hooks’ and ‘tartan paint’, anything that I think might make it into a song.  The inspiration arrived!  How does inspiration arrive?  I have no idea but it’s usually a clash of a couple of thoughts, in this case Dylan and Billy Joel, and specifically two of their lines: 

Dylan’s: ‘he just smoked my eyelids/and punched my cigarette’ (Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again)

Joel’s: ‘Making love to his tonic and gin’ (Piano Man)

I’d been aware of both songs for years but somehow at this time I recognised better the device they’d use to write it.  Had I only had one line I wouldn’t have seen it, like most things you need to see a pattern first before it becomes obvious, so both songs were needed.  The lesson learnt: the words can be in any order, they just need rearranging to fit (Eric Morecambe was way ahead of me).  So the term ‘POETS Day’ found itself as the last two words of the chorus, a good halfway into the song.

There are three other musical influences in this song are Beck, John Martyn and John Prine but I hope you can’t hear any of that.  From Beck I stole the picking pattern from his song ‘Lost Cause’, from John Martyn’s ‘Over the Hill’ I stole the tuning and most of the chords, though not necessarily in the right order (thanks again Eric) and from John Prine I stole the lyrical intent in his song ‘You Are My Everything’ in which he uses lists to declare how great his love is, with the end being after all these lists that ‘you are my everything.’

You can listen to the John Prine song here

The verses came easy after that and they’r’e a mixture of people I’ve met (although the names have been changed), working for a living and how it feels to be skint.  At the time I wrote it I didn’t have kids or a credit card so the second half of the song has come back to haunt me:

“Now I’m working all the time/ the house just eats my wages but you say we’re getting by

We’re bouncing round the credit cards and selling stuff online.

I’ve twelve days on two days off/ the lads all drink for England or until they all throw up

In the corner of a northern town my kids are growing up”

It’s probably one of the songs I’m most proud of having written, and it taught me that sometimes you really need to take time and work at an idea if it’s going to come out close to how you might imagine it.

Listen to POETS Day

Spotify

Bandcamp

YouTube – live recording