Moonkissed – Old Park Dream

This track features on the album Old Park Dreams, released in 2022 and is the only song I’ve ever joint written, and it’s an old one, probably written around 2008.  I remember the room we were all in, but (disclaimer) I don’t really remember who wrote what, but think I remember.

Myself, Loreto Murray and Gus MacGregor were in a band called LOMAN, and it was coming to it’s end.  It’s strange that one of our last collective acts was to write this; a song about an enduring relationship.  I was playing banjo, Gus came up with a chord progression and Loreto guided what the song was about.  My memory is that because I was on banjo I added to the melody of the song simply playing single notes, Loreto worked through the lyrics and Gus kept us on track structurally.   The instrumental part came out of the banjo, which is weird when you now hear the recording as it’s a cello and slide guitar playing that part.

The song always went down well live, and people would usually comment on it within a set if I did it.  I always found it funny and slightly to my chagrin that it would be the only one I didn’t write fully; but them’s the breaks.

Recording of it was fairly easy, I knew more of less the arrangement.  I knew that the plucked cello would plod throughout it, I knew that it needed a musical bed to sit in and just worked on getting all the counter rhythms to work.  There is more guitar on this recording then I had originally intended, but I started playing around with some lead lines and we just edited out what didn’t work, and then I added the slide for the instrumental; the slide was included because I felt it had worked well on another track on the album Ebb n Flow.  I knew the cello would be playing that instrumental line but just recorded a slide version just incase.  In the end both slide and cello are playing the same thing, I left the decision on what to keep to and how to mix it pretty much to Ben Haynes, sometimes it’s better to just trust other people’s ears.

The vocal was recorded in one take with both me and Loreto around the one mic.  We’ve sang this song a lot live over the years, so it didn’t feel that difficult to do, I also thought that it gives more life to the vocal, although it was tempting to record them separately and edit them to perfection.

Moonkissed can be listened to here

Click here if you would like to download the album Old Park Dreams