Postcard From The Lorelei

Disc Two

All words, music and recordings copyright © Alan Wrigley

	Crying in the Wilderness
	Unlike much of the music I've recorded in the last 4 years this hasn't been simmering for a long time in my head, but is brand new. It marks my transition from cheerfulness to gloominess over the course of the first pandemic year. I was part-way through recording it when my friend Irene Murphy died. It seemed particularly poignant given the subject matter of the song. Recalling that the slow movement of Bruckner's 7th Symphony was influenced by the death of his hero Richard Wagner, I added a new ending to the song based on the line "All the good people are taken too soon" to form a mini-requiem for Irene. The saxophone solo in the middle is my 21st century take on the solo trumpet in Vaughan Williams' 3rd Symphony, complete with the discordant half-notes that he heard from an army trumpeter while practising. The symphony is effectively a requiem for the First World War, but whereas Vaughan Williams' trumpet echoes through the last resting place and suggests closure, my saxophone is crying in the wilderness and evokes disillusion with no resolution.

Crying in the Wilderness

Unlike much of the music I've recorded in the last 4 years this hasn't been simmering for a long time in my head, but is brand new. It marks my transition from cheerfulness to gloominess over the course of the first pandemic year. I was part-way through recording it when my friend Irene Murphy died. It seemed particularly poignant given the subject matter of the song. Recalling that the slow movement of Bruckner's 7th Symphony was influenced by the death of his hero Richard Wagner, I added a new ending to the song based on the line "All the good people are taken too soon" to form a mini-requiem for Irene.

The saxophone solo in the middle is my 21st century take on the solo trumpet in Vaughan Williams' 3rd Symphony, complete with the discordant half-notes that he heard from an army trumpeter while practising. The symphony is effectively a requiem for the First World War, but whereas Vaughan Williams' trumpet echoes through the last resting place and suggests closure, my saxophone is crying in the wilderness and evokes disillusion with no resolution.

	Find Our Way Home
	This song is more personal and introspective than most I've written in the last few years. I was born and raised in the south but my father came from the north. For my first 30 years I remained in and around London, but since then I have lived in many different places including long spells in the north. So by the time I arrived in Sowerby Bridge in 2013 I felt no particular allegiance to any region. At the time I assumed I would move on again in a few years as I have always done in the past (25 moves since I left university). However, the question of whether I really belonged in the north or the south still occupied my mind. Not long afterwards I was walking along the hillside of the Calder Valley on a cold day, thinking not only about whether I really belonged here but also about the whole nature and purpose of my life. Ever since my parents died a few years earlier I had felt that after guiding them through their final years so that they could stay in their own home, I had repaid my debt for their care when I was young and had probably fulfilled my purpose in life. It was now just a question of waiting patiently to fade away into oblivion. In the distance I saw a green signal on the railway line in the valley, and the seeds of this song started germinating from the thoughts swirling around in my head. As a postscript I'm happy to say that it was only a couple of months before I found a new purpose and I'm no longer in fade-away mode!

Find Our Way Home

This song is more personal and introspective than most I've written in the last few years.

I was born and raised in the south but my father came from the north. For my first 30 years I remained in and around London, but since then I have lived in many different places including long spells in the north. So by the time I arrived in Sowerby Bridge in 2013 I felt no particular allegiance to any region. At the time I assumed I would move on again in a few years as I have always done in the past (25 moves since I left university). However, the question of whether I really belonged in the north or the south still occupied my mind.

Not long afterwards I was walking along the hillside of the Calder Valley on a cold day, thinking not only about whether I really belonged here but also about the whole nature and purpose of my life. Ever since my parents died a few years earlier I had felt that after guiding them through their final years so that they could stay in their own home, I had repaid my debt for their care when I was young and had probably fulfilled my purpose in life. It was now just a question of waiting patiently to fade away into oblivion.

In the distance I saw a green signal on the railway line in the valley, and the seeds of this song started germinating from the thoughts swirling around in my head.

As a postscript I'm happy to say that it was only a couple of months before I found a new purpose and I'm no longer in fade-away mode!

	Jump (from a broken country, without a parachute)
	A song which is the musical equivalent of brutalist architecture. It has an industrial flavour and is something of a departure for me. I wrote it around 2017 while watching my country tear itself apart over Brexit.

	Dreamland Tapestry
	This is a song about dementia. It was inspired by watching a friend gradually succumb to Alzheimers, though it's not about her, but rather an exploration of how some people might be affected by it. I tried to make the instrumental break in the middle as unsettlingly dream-like as I could. I've wanted to record a song using Taiko drums for years.

	The Silent Scream
	My first vegan song. There is a YouTube video to accompany the song here.

	Rhythm of the Spheres
	A song about our wanton disregard for the planet. At the end of the piece there is a quote from Aaron Copland's ballet score Appalachian Spring.

	Lockdown
	A song in my industrial style written during the first Covid19 lockdown in April 2020.

	The Ballad of Deep Lock
	I doubt if I will ever do anything better than this. I put my heart and soul into it. The idea for a narrative song based on a repeating 5-bar sequence first came to me in the early 1990s, initially as an autobiography. I only ever wrote the first line ("It started in the Spring") and then abandoned it, but the musical idea stayed in my head. In 2015 a suggestion was made at artSBridge (the arts support group in Sowerby Bridge) to organise an artistic event to celebrate the fact that the town has the deepest canal lock in the country, and I wrote this song using the musical ideas I'd had 20 years earlier. In the end the event never took place but I felt the song was good enough to stand on its own. I would describe it as an electronic folk ballad with a prog rock style interlude about two-thirds of the way through. Because I hate under-complicating things, this interlude is in 11/4 time.

The Ballad of Deep Lock

I doubt if I will ever do anything better than this. I put my heart and soul into it.

The idea for a narrative song based on a repeating 5-bar sequence first came to me in the early 1990s, initially as an autobiography. I only ever wrote the first line ("It started in the Spring") and then abandoned it, but the musical idea stayed in my head. In 2015 a suggestion was made at artSBridge (the arts support group in Sowerby Bridge) to organise an artistic event to celebrate the fact that the town has the deepest canal lock in the country, and I wrote this song using the musical ideas I'd had 20 years earlier. In the end the event never took place but I felt the song was good enough to stand on its own.

I would describe it as an electronic folk ballad with a prog rock style interlude about two-thirds of the way through. Because I hate under-complicating things, this interlude is in 11/4 time.