There are an unusual number of references to God or deities in the songs on this album and both Herbie and I have done this completely independently of each other. We’ve never had a conversation about God, mainly because neither of us are remotely interested in the subject, but we were both brought up in religious families: me as a Catholic and Herbie as a Mormon. We both announced our total lack of interest in our religions to our families in our teens, scandalizing them in the process. But like with most teen “problems”, that was forgiven and forgotten in time.
On Friday 4th February 2011, I woke up at 2:15 with a melody in my head. I knew from experience that if this was not immediately documented it would disappear and I would remember nothing in the morning. So I got out of bed, went into the studio, got a guitar, worked out chords to sing to and wrote Pray. I wrote all the words to the song before going back to bed at about 3:30, after the end of the chorus came to me: “if I thought God might listen I’d pray”. The end of the last verse goes “that I’d be forgiven and the legless might get up and dance”. Or pigs will fly. Or fat chance of being forgiven for anything, in other words. I’m not self-psychoanalyzing, but Catholics are notoriously guilty and constantly needing forgiveness for the slightest infringement, with a visit to the local church for confession to a priest. I did it myself many times as a child, but never as an adult.
Even without the psychoanalysis it feels like there’s residual godliness lurking in our subconscious minds that needs release. This is probably a better way than most for exorcising that.
Herbie and I wrote this collection of songs over a period of several years. We had already written many of them when Göran Nyström came to me in late 2011 and proposed doing a couple of Syd Barrett songs for fun. That turned into an album of Syd songs for Men On The Border (MOTB) in a lavish gatefold CD with a booklet. The follow-up album “Jumpstart” was mostly written by Göran and myself, like the following bunch of singles. All my songs prior to MOTB were shelved for the time being. Herbie’s too. After I was lucky enough to get Herbie and Björn into MOTB playing bass and drums, Herbie brought along a demo of Northern Skies to a rehearsal, just to play it for us. It was great, but typically we had more than enough songs, which is usually the way of it.
It was a bit like that in Tuckers Lilla Kapell, which was Lasse Forberg’s band. Herbie and I contributed a few songs along the way, but the overwhelming majority were Lasse’s, who wrote genuine Tucker’s songs. When I wrote a song for that band, it was basically a Lasse song with my name on it. Copying Lasse’s style to fit the context. I hope that someday, someone will look at the lyrics for all these Padded Room songs. There are forty-six of them (so far) and they’re sadly ignored. Herbie is a great songwriter and a master with lyrics. It’s no coincidence that on all the songs which are credited to Etheridge/Parkin, I wrote the music and Herbie wrote the lyrics. This is usually because if I don’t find something concrete to write about very quickly, my mind goes blank and I get nothing at all. But Herb always comes up with the goods. That’s how it’s been since we started writing together in the 80s. t-f!64� B