“Somehow, in spite of trouble, ours will be ever lasting love”
And so to the genius that is Joni Mitchell. This song opens side 2 (a distinction lost with the CD) of her first LP “Song To A Seagull” (Mar 1968). This side was labelled "Out of the City and Down to the Seaside" (side 1 being "I Came to the City").
I first heard Joni on a TV programme that featured her playing in front of a small studio audience. It was the early 1970s and I’d been playing guitar for a year or two, so I was about 11 or 12 years old. I was instantly smitten on various levels, and have remained so. I remember being confused by what she was doing with her left hand; I didn’t recognise any of the chord shapes. Later I learned that she used open tunings in pretty much all of her guitar songs. I believe this was because she had contracted polio in an epidemic (the same one that affected Neil Young) at the age of nine. This made it difficult for her to voice chords in standard tuning, which inspired her to explore alternative tunings. This has given her guitar accompaniments a rich and distinctive harmonic and rhythmic flavour.
Her first album is quite different from the later ones in that it was heavily influenced by classical music. It was produced by David Crosby, and thankfully, it lacked the folk-rock overdubs that were in fashion at the time. For me, this song and the following track “The Dawntreader” are two of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard.

Sisotowbell Lane

From Countdown to Ecstasy (1973), SD’s second album. At first it seems to be a tender love song, until you realise that it couldn’t possibly be any such thing. This is Steely Dan, after all. The album, like its predecessor Can’t Buy a Thrill, explores topics such as drug abuse, prostitution, materialism, class envy, and West Coast excess. Their usual up-beat topics.

Pearl Of The Quarter

Willin’ – a Lowell George song that Little Feat first released on their eponymous debut album (January 1971). When it came to recording the song Lowell had hurt his hand in a model aeroplane accident, so Ry Cooder was called in to play the slide guitar. They rerecorded it (with LG on guitar) for their second album, Sailin’ Shoes (May 1972). My version is slower, and closer to the live versions I’ve heard. In particular, the one on the live album Waiting For Columbus (1978), which was recorded during seven performances in 1977 (the first four shows were at Finsbury Park’s Rainbow Theatre in early August, 1977).
Lowell used to introduce the song as the one that got him the sack from Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. There are three stories around his sacking. The first is that FZ felt George was just too talented to be in his band, and should go off and form his own band. The second is that LG played a 15-minute guitar solo with his amplifier switched off. The third, which LG himself cited, is that FZ didn’t approve of the drug references in the song (‘weed, whites and wine’).

Willin

My first song. I’ve been playing the guitar and singing other people’s songs for 44 years and it’s taken me this long to write one of my own. The sequence of the first three chords of the verse has been kicking around for years and I recently made the effort to complete them into a song. It all came surprisingly easy, even the lyrics, which I finished last week. The last thing to work out was the melody. This wasn’t immediately obvious from the chords, which are quite dense harmonically. It started out in straight 4/4 time but sounded too much like a hymn, so I gave it a 12/8 feel which I think works much better. At first I didn’t particularly like the song, but it’s grown on me quite a bit, particularly over the last few days while I’ve been knocking it into shape. I hope others can get something from it and that it’s been worth the effort. I’ve already started on my second song.

Never Shed A Tear

My favourite song from my favourite Steely Dan LP (Aja). I can identify with this so much.
Fagen: If a college football team like the University of Alabama could have a grandiose name like the “Crimson Tide,” the nerds and losers should be entitled to a grandiose name as well.
Becker: “Crimson Tide” didn’t mean anything to us except the exaggerated grandiosity that’s bestowed on winners. “Deacon Blues” was the equivalent for the loser in our song.
One of those songs where you hear something new each time you listen to it, and I’ve listened to it so many times over the forty years. I did this with the hugely talented Nigel Brunt on piano the other week at the Plume. I’d really like to do it with a three- or four-piece horn section, which comes in with those gorgeous sustained and extended chords in the second verse (arranged by Tom Scott on the original recording).

Deacon Blues (cover)

This is one of the few traditional English songs I do. The guitar on this is very much after Steve Winwood’s version (except that he used a plectrum, of course) as recorded by Traffic on their excellent 1970 LP John Barleycorn Must Die. Chris Wood’s flute playing on that recording is rather nice.
John Barleycorn is a personification of the extremely important cereal crop barley, used for making beer and whisky. In their notes to the Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, editors A L Lloyd and Ralph Vaughan Williams ponder whether the ballad is "an unusually coherent folklore survival" or "the creation of an antiquarian revivalist, which has passed into popular currency and become 'folklorised'". It is in any case, they note, "an old song", with printed versions dating as far back as the sixteenth century.
I did this in two takes. I like my picking, but as ever, my singing is a bit shaky and breathless in places. I get too excited.

John Barleycorn

By John Martyn, from his 1971 LP Bless the Weather.
I always loved his percussive right-hand technique, which I try and emulate here a bit. He played this in BADGAD tuning, I believe, which I guess is a naughty version of DADGAD. I do it in standard. This was the first take, which is slightly chaotic in places, but I like the feel (more important).

Head & Heart

From Steely Dan’s seventh album Gaucho (Nov 1980).
This was their last album before they disbanded in June 1981, to reappear playing live in 1996 and release their eighth LP in 2000.
It marked the high point of their penchant for studio perfectionism and obsessive recording technique. They used at least forty-two musicians, spent two years in the studio, and far exceeded the original advance given by the record label. They spent four hours trying to perfect less than a minute of music - the lengthy fadeout of the side one opener "Babylon Sisters."
Third World Man closes side two, and on this song and the side one opener, neither Becker nor Fagen play any instruments; Fagen provides only the lead vocal. It was actually recorded at the sessions for the previous album - Aja - but with different lyrics and title - “Were You Blind That Day?" This explains how Larry Carlton (“Mr 335”) came to be playing the guitar solo, since he wasn’t at the Gaucho sessions. They only included this song as a last-minute replacement for the ill-fated “Second Arrangement”, after that song was accidentally wiped by a studio engineer. Thank goodness they did.
I’ve only recently started to play the song, and it’s become one of my favourites to perform. I’ve tried to work in bits of Carlton’s solo in the instrumental verse. Musically, it includes a lot of my SD favourites, including: repeating a phrase with the same melody but with different chords; the way they voice the chord across instruments; their use of the mu-major chord (a major triad with an added 2nd – usually in the bass - this gives an angular, slightly awkward quality to the phrase).
Interpretation of their lyrics is always difficult. I see this one as being about a war veteran suffering from PTSD.

Third World Man (cover)

By Steve Winwood, originally from Blind Faith's eponymous album (1969).

Can't Find My Way Home (cover)

On their second LP, “Cool for Cats” (April 1979) and released as a single in May 1979, c/w “It’s So Dirty”
As with most of their songs, the lyrics were written by Chris Difford, and the music was written by Glenn Tilbrook. It doesn’t have a chorus, as Tilbrook didn’t want to interrupt the narrative flow of the lyric. There is a bridge after the third verse that sets up an ingenious key change into the fourth verse, with the home key returning for the fifth and final verse. It also shares two interesting (to me) features with another favourite Squeeze song – “Labelled With Love” - in that it uses the major scale with the major seventh – not the more usual minor seventh of pop music. For me this gives the song a more ‘up’ feel, in spite of its lyrics. The second feature is that the final turnaround cadence is IV – I (sometimes called ‘church cadence’ because of its use in hymn music) rather than the much more prominent V – I of popular music. They are in good company here. Two of my favourite Beatles songs – “She’s Leaving Home” and “Eleanor Rigby” use this turnaround cadence.

Up The Junction (cover)

From their sixth studio LP, the double album Grizzical Faffiti (Feb 1975, side 3, track 2). It was an outtake from the Led Zeppelin III sessions and was recorded in July 1970. Inspired by the cottage of the same name owned by Plant’s family near Machynlleth in Wales, Page recorded it on his Martin D-28 in C6 tuning (CACGCE) which is what I use here. I believe that the phrase is Welsh for “golden breast” or “golden hill”. Something to do with the sunrise, apparently. The following track on that album is their worst ever.
I’m using my new 10W amp, which I’ve had for about six months but which I’ve only just unboxed. I’ve never owned an electric guitar and don’t know anything about electrical sound equipment, so I was quite anxious about using it for the first time. After endless twiddling of the settings (and those on my guitar) I think I found a half decent acoustic guitar sound. I’m also using Vaughan’s chorus pedal that he has lent me, to hear what it does. I’m quite pleased with this, and I think I’ll get one. Thanks, Vaughan. What with the settings on this, combined with those on the amp and the guitar, the permutations were endless. It took about three hours to get a sound that I liked, and eighteen takes of this track to get something that was half-decent. And I still fluffed it at the end (my epitaph).

IanKR

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