Dressed Up A Human Being (Demo)

Halfway

Boy With Weapon

Break

We Have Arrived (Demo)

Rain

A strange and apocryphal traditional song that portrays Jesus more as the Son of Satan than of God! It felt ripe for an electro-folk treatment.

The image is one of my paintings imposed over a photo I took in Chora Church, Istanbul.

Bitter Withy (Trad, arr Burgess) (Demo)

One of the better-known folk songs. I used the version from Cecil Sharp's collection as a basis for a new arrangement with a few small but significant changes to the lyrics.

The Drowned Lover (Trad, arr Burgess) (Demo)

How Will The World Change? (Demo)

I love a bit of mediaeval Apocrypha. (Listen to my recording of The Bitter Withy for a more controversial example!) This one is from the Child Ballads and dates back to the Feast of Corpus Christi in the early 15th century, though perhaps not quite in the same form as I found it, in The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs. (The cover picture is a sketch I did of frosty apple leaves - I don't have one of cherry leaves, I'm afraid!)

The Cherry Tree Carol

Three songs inspired in different ways by thinking about the environment. 

I wrote Beauty as a teenager; this is somewhat rewritten but the main tunes are the same, as are about 50% of the words. The other two songs were written after it was pointed out to me by Hazel Watson of Watson and Lockett commented on the dearth of folk music engaging with the ecological crisis. I set myself the challenge of writing a song that plays on folk tropes but accidentally wrote two. 

Recording and mixing aren't my fortes. I could spend ages trying to get these better, without achieving much, so I've posted them in rough and ready form as demos, because it's the songwriting I really want to share.

Beauty demo

Every Blessing Is A Curse demo

Carbon Kings demo

Not my best standards of production but I'm very fond of this song, so here goes.

Demos from Another Time

Love's Like Death

Demos

Angel (demo)

A cover of the Richard and Linda Thomson number, which has haunted me for years, ever since I heard it performed by the Home Service as part of The Mysteries at the National Theatre. It's a little odd - specially the fathers verse - and I don't approve of using 'man' as metonymy for 'person'. But it's a remarkable song, nonetheless.

We Sing Hallelujah (Thompson, arr Burgess)

Something I'm working on again, after a gap. What do you think?

Lyrics:

The harrier in the morning air,
Knows just one perfect thing:
Connection with the trembling flesh
On the field under its wing.
Yet the harrier also understands,
In its blood and in its bone,
Our besuited raptors and their prey;
The rituals they condone. 

Share this food and sing,
At the cold and frosty dawn.
Sing, sing, sing,
For the willow, beech and thorn.

The field mouse on the harrowed earth
Knows many desperate things.
Hunger, upheaval, hovering death,
The vivid images fear brings.
Yet the mouse it also understands,
In its bone and in its blood
The tragedy of the human world,
The coming of the flood.

Share this drink and sing,
As the frost melts from the ground.
Sing, sing, sing,
As the day it comes around.

Two boys pass along the hedge
And do not say a word,
Buttoned and scarved against the wind,
Seeming fixed as mouse and bird.
But the harrier in the silvery sun,
The mouse beneath the fern,
Can never know their human hearts
And the facts they can't unlearn.

Share this hearth and sing,
At the cold and frosty dawn.
Sing, sing, sing,
For the willow, beech and thorn.

For the boys all this can be remade.
Though bones with blood run wet,
Although the mouse cannot rise up,
Nor the harrier feel regret. 
For liberty's not that the mighty win,
Not tooth nor beak nor claw,
Liberty's what all lovers know:
That they can change the law.

Share this song and sing,
As the frost melts from the ground.
Sing, sing, sing,
As the day it comes around.

Two Boys - work in progress demo

I'm Glad We Didn't Go to Soho

Driving Home

When I was about 17, maybe 16, I wrote a song. But at the time I thought it was too good and I must have subconsciously copied it. Anyway, nearly 30 years later I haven't heard the tune anywhere else. So maybe I did write it! So here's a new arrangement. The two main tunes (the initial vocal tune and the 'big' violin tune) both date from around 1991, as do the chords and about 40% of the words. Finally, it really does not suit my voice; I'm presenting it to you not as a polished perofrmance, but as a co-writing project between myself now and myself then.

I may regret this.

Beauty (demo of 2020 arrangement)

Firstly, do please check out The Black Smock Band, in which I'm the fiddle-player, here on SoundCloud. Meanwhile, here are some examples of my solo bits and pieces, much of which happened pre-Black Smock Band, often under the name ZeroSumGame.

Paul D Burgess

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