A Coming Of Age Track By Track Part 7 of 12

7. Warm Water

This is a sad song with sad beginnings. I started writing it on my Grandmothers piano when I went to keep her company just after my auntie had lost her battle with cancer. I think I finished it at four in the morning at Soulsville SE5, slightly the worse for wear on a really miserable New Years Eve shivering and snivelling in gloves.

It’s not really about death, just general feelings of loss and abandonment.

I wanted to capture that feeling of when you’re feeling down and things get on top of you to an almost surreal level and you have a shower and it feels like you’re in there for ever, you just drift away. Either that or when you totally submerge yourself in the bath and you can only hear your own thoughts.

So feelings of distance, dislocation, disenchantment and all those other happy emotions. I wanted the guitars to sound like waves lapping, and the strings to sound like clouds gathering, but the whole thing to have a sunset quality.

This one owes a big debt to my hero, Burt Bacharch, and Q magazine said already that it’s “the best song Carole King never wrote”. Which I suppose is a polite way of a saying it’s a big Carole King rip-off, which is probably true! Tapestry is the Carole King album to get if you like things like this, very warm and beautiful, melancholic but still uplifting, like being in a log cabin on an evening at the end of the summer.

I don’t want you to think I sit around the mixing desk blubbing all the time, but the tears were rolling again when Ali sang it and my my chest was bursting when the strings went down but like I say, it’s a sad song.

There’s a great bit I found at end of the recording which has the rhythm section sounding like two old timers, “That was the one.” “Yep, that was the one for me” “Yep.” “Yep.”It feels like it’s been around for a long time though. We get criticised for not sounding modern enough, but the way I see it, I’d rather be unfashionable now and still be listened to for a long time, than this weeks darlings that no one wants to hear about come next week. We’re in it for the long run and the big prize.

I don’t know how often we’ll play it live, but we did it at the album launch and you could hear a pin drop.

Warm water, how can you turn to me and say “It’s over”?

Warm Water by Ruffa Lane Records