written 2005. I wrote a lyric in the early 90s called Paper Eyes which was probably very different to this but never had music to it. I'd been watching some film where a girl is left alone for a bit and cuts out eyes from magazines and spreads them around her for protection, like an 'evil eye' type of thing. Years later I started writing a pretty sad song about what it must be like to be the one giving away a child for money reasons. Paper eyes then became the Queen's eyes on banknotes, and how money, or the lack thereof, will never hurt the child, to whom the song is sung to. (This is fiction, by the way)

Paper Eyes

written 2003. not really about anything as such, just some verses I threw together.

The Spiders Of Winter

written 2003, after a friend of mine was told by a "palm reader" that she'd never amount to anything. I thought it was a bit out of order.

Belief Is All

An acoustic album deliberately recorded quickly between March to August 2008, in several 2 to 3 hr sessions at Mill Hill Music Complex. The whole idea was that Fil just recorded the takes, nothing else. No fades, no cut-and-paste, no effects. He did eventually on some tracks, but that was to make up for my scattiness. I wanted it as raw-sounding and intimate as an acoustic album could be.

Leon Star Hamilton: Vocals, guitar, bass, ukulele, mandolin, keyboard, conga, drums on Belief Is All.
Katy Anchant: backing vocals, lead vocals on The Healing Process.
Gary Power: drums. He did the whole album in two 3hr sessions, by the way.
Ethan Wilson: poem on Long-Winged Bird.
Fil Ross: Sound engineering, solo on The Healing Process, encouragement and continual feelgood factor.

My Time Of Year

written 2006. About coming home from holiday. I had the first couple of lines kicking about for about a year in a song provisionally called 'Panadol Breakfast', which was never finished. For the recording, a friend of mine, Ethan Wilson recited almost correctly What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, And Where, And Why by Edna St. Vincent Millay, after I asked him one night in the pub what he was going to do on my album, and he said I'm going to do a poem. So we cut it up and put it on Long-Winged Bird. Gary Power, who did the drums after everything was done, started laughing at the end as to him it sounded like a sermon being given. The mandolin was a 1929 one which was beautiful, and ornate but utterly unplayable. All the neck could take was the tension on one twin string, so I had to re-learn the melody.

Long-Winged Bird

written 2005. another song about feeling fuzzy in the head and tummy.

Snowed Under

written 2003. I think this was better as an instrumental. Maurice Gibb had just died, and though I wasn't really a fan of Bee Gees at the time I had the groove to Stayin' Alive in my head and came up with this. Sort of in the same mindset as Ocean Lights, lyrically.

Seabirds

Written 2005. An instrumental lullaby written in Tenerife.

You Can't Hurt Me

Written 2006. Written about sitting in Trent Park and feeling the sun and the warm breeze there.

F.A.T.B.A.T.S.

Written 2004. Stumming absent-mindedly while watching Titanic, when the ship's going down and the water's dappled with light from the ship. I started thinking about sunlight on the sea at sunset in Newquay, and in Scotland.

Ocean Lights

I write songs. If you like them or want to use them, get in touch.

LS Hamilton

Popular tracks