Malin 5 has a simple arrangement: two Spanish guitars, double bass, trombone, two vocals, no keyboards or percussion. I think it’s a Jekyll and Hyde song. The lyrics are clunky in places, especially the pre-chorus - “falling, calling” etc, and the rhyming of “face” and “place”, the repetition of “warm” within two lines. And the overall image is a cliche – it echoes From Here to Eternity. - but I really like the chorus. Its a song of feeling and of place: an attempt to bottle a genuine memory. It's the oldest song on the album, so old that it lost its bridge to a song on Pound Town. Because of that falling/calling block it lay around for too long and maybe lost some of the feel. It probably should have been bottled sooner (though perhaps not with that ending :-).
It was supposed to start “soft wind blowing” but I kept singing “warm wind blowing” because of the alliteration and because the word “warm” was coming up later and often your own lyrics are the hardest to remember - the alternatives are still floating around in your head ready to jump on your tongue - the words are still fluid. Ironically “warm wind” just seems...softer. The chorus with the assonant ‘s’ sounds makes me think of little waves on a shore – I certainly see that when singing it, especially on the decaying rhythmic sibillance of “holds”, “pulls”, “to sea”, “once ”. Those work for me as little waves hissing and pulling back. So I think that bit’s good. Maybe “Jekyll and Hyde" is code for could have been a great song that didn’t come off...
The sentiment seemed worth a song – the sea, particularly the Atlantic is important in my personal mythology and it was a happy memory for me. Also I liked the image of the dunes. (Although unfortunately, as a geek, dunes draw me from the real place to my childhood imaginings of the barrow wights.)
The place was a beach on Inishowen backed by dunes, and we were lying not in the shallows, but on the edge of the beach, late on a warm summer evening. The title was mostly “Waves”, occasionally “Inishowen”. Then, late on, I perversely chose a butchered shipping forecast (ensuring that the wind speed would be more accurately documented, of course).
I think that, in the correct format, the forecast would be “Malin southwest 5 1009 falling slowly” but that was just too clunky. (Incidentally, I’ve been to Malin Head several times, and I think in reality it’s always “Malin westerly 7, rain or slight drizzle, moderate or poor”. Malin head is like one of those staging posts dead people in movies arrive at for a bit of exposition before they go/do not go to the light). Every album has to have a stupidly named song, like "McArthur Park", where you hear the music but have no idea what the title of the song is, and this is my one.
If the lyric flaws are Mr Hyde, the Jekyll part was that my intention was to complete a wistful, two-voice harmony pop song: that was the initial idea, and it does have that feel. A reference track would be Crowded House’s She Goes On”“ (Yea. I know. But you have to aim high...). I rememberthat having more harmony, probably because I always sing along :-) It is a beautiful, monumentally well-crafted song, full of love and loss with the bonus of a radical key shift instrumental and Beatlesy eastern ending.
So back to my effort. It’s OK. It’s a simple Am guitar song - just open Am and Em chords. Sometimes the Em is picked in a pattern dangerously close to a McCartney melody. I tried to avoid that. There are many echoes elsewhere on the album - I hear them in everything - but I worked hard to ensure that no ripping-off occurred. (Any references are explicit, like the shoutouts in “Hippies”, and do not abuse copyright). I like the hanging Bb7 to A7 sequence on the ending of the verses – it undulates nicely. And I also like the simple key shift to play the tune in Dm and then return to Am for the second verse. That just happened naturally – it flowed. I started out undescoring that middle section with sea recordings and sampled gongs. These persisted for a long time but they definitely did not flow. So when I mixed the song I sank them and left the instruments to speak.
Andy’s bass trombone solo got some editing. The idea was to have foghorns coming through the air at organic timings, leaving harmonies hanging and overlapping, so a few notes are not exactly where he played them. The licks on the second Spanish guitar throughout the song sometimes came off, sometimes didn’t, but I admired their enthusiasm. One thing that did change was that the lead guitar became the main harmony on the chorus rather than a second voice. That countermelody just happened during noodling and then got pinned down and formalised. And that's all I have to say about “Malin 5 Falling Slowly”.