Daft Old Boy! Thinks I’m a cuddly toy. Does everybody have an uncle like this? The melody is brazenly stolen from a medieval Spanish dance tune. I think I wrote it around 2002 after my Uncle Roy chased an attractive young female friend of mine round a table at a family party… Because he couldn’t move very fast, I don’t think she realised she was being chased. But I was watching – I knew beforehand to keep him at arms length.
Author: baywhitaker@gmail.com
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Twisted My Heart
This is a love song to my kid – when she was little our entire lives, for a while, were engulfed in her pretend world. Credit to Trevor Thomas on the recording, providing multi-instrumental assistance with panache, as always.
The Cinderella story must be one of the best known stories in the world… but in our version Cinderella doesn’t get rescued by a fairy godmother, or a prince. Instead she takes control of her own situation, stops being a goody-two-shoes, and goes off to build a new sort of life for herself.
This old song is one from the archive – I wrote it in (I guess?) 2012 for The Fates, an A Cappella Quartet I belonged to for several years. The music is influenced by Hungarian Folk Music.
a new ballad for summer 2022 – a folkish allegory about a mythical creature known as Yafouki N’Mpeeh who is marauding the country in various ways.
In 2018 heavy rain flooded the river in Hillsborough where we live. Our house is on higher ground, so perhaps that was why a rat decided to come in our house. My daughter Holly was about 13 at the time and I was in the garden when she came out and informed me there was a rat sitting on our shelves. I couldn’t believe it! We never had a rat before. So there was a puzzle – what to do? Well, the song tells the story of what we did do, and the different people and animals that we invited to help us. All true. Honest to God!
Me and Holly, we were well freaked out!
The Rat Song
The song is written using minor 6th Gypsy Jazz chords, which I can’t recommend highly enough as useful ways to jazz up your songwriting and impress people.