Category: single

The Road (revisited)

Lafrowda concert photo by Jude Harley
Lafrowda photo

Now available as a single on Bandcamp, and coming to other sites and services in the next week or so, so MP3 removed from here for now.

First (and possibly last) single from the forthcoming Swan Songs album.

It’s late and the driver has nothing to say
One more stop ahead
On an endless highway
One more place to be, and nowhere to stay
For the road was the ruin of me
The tour bus, the tranny,
The fluffed chords of fame
The days in the airport, the runaway train
You don’t care for my songs
And you don’t know my name
For the road was the ruin of me

I was never a drifter, I’d no urge to roam
But somehow the tour bus
Became my home
The scenery fades
And the scene is long gone
And the road was the ruin of me
The smoke and the pipe dream,
The whisky, the beer
There’s nothing to treasure
And nothing to fear
There’s no one here now
To send out for some gear
And the road was the ruin of me

The call of the wild,
And the song of the road
The end of the game
And the call of the void
There’s no one to meet
And there’s nowhere to hide
The road was the ruin of me
The heroes and villains,
The bait and the switch
The hole in my sock
And the travelling itch
I’ll never be famous,
I’ll never be rich
For the road was the ruin of me

I drank much too deep at the wishing well
I knew what I wanted but never could tell
Now I’ve only these dreams
And these few words to sell
For the road was the ruin of me
All that I’ve learned is how little I know
All I’ve come home to is a new place to go
And it’s never a place that I wanted to be
For the road was the ruin of me

Links to available albums

This site hasn’t really kept up with the ridiculous number of my album and single releases in the last year or two. No, I don’t expect them to keep me in my old age. If someone occasionally buys an album or even a track, that’s nice, but it’s really more about getting as many of the songs as possible out there in some reasonably structured, (hopefully) semi-permanent form. Just in case someone, sometime likes them enough to dig out the obscurities.

So here is a list of the Harley albums and singles currently available including content summaries These releases replace cassette and CD albums previously available  (which is how they come to be released in such a short timeframe), and are at present digital-only releases. Right now, some of them are still only available from Bandcamp, but I’m working on that.  Some may be the basis in due course for multi-media projects: for instance, I’m currently working on a music and verse project that will draw on some of the instrumental tracks from Back In Free Fall and Still In Free Fall, and an expanded multi-media version of Tears of Morning. The list below is just a barebones list of releases. (The links here are to the Bandcamp albums – the Available Albums link includes further links to other sources such as Apple Music.

  • Strictly Off The Record‘ and ‘Further Off The Record‘ are slightly different ‘greatest hits’ collections. Admittedly I don’t actually have any hits, but these are the tracks/songs that have been listened to most, or have had radio play, or get asked for during live performances, or that other performers have expressed an interest in learning. They’re a good place to start (and finish, in most cases…) as they include 20 or so songs that are a pretty good cross-section of my better recordings.
  • Moonflow VI was the first single. It’s an extended version of an instrumental included on Tears of Morning.
  • Tears of Morning is a collection of songs with a Shropshire connection, including settings of verse by A.E. Housman and ‘W.H.B.’
  • The single One Step Away (From The Blues) is one of a handful of tracks recorded for an album by Bob Theil, Don MacLeod, Pat Orchard, Bob Cairns and myself in the 80s. Unfortunately, the album was never released.
  • The EP ‘View From The Top‘ features Don MacLeod, and consists of songs we perform (occasionally!) as a duo, written by us individually or together.
  • The EP ‘Hands of the Craftsman‘ consists of songs and verse from the 1980 review ‘Nice…If You Can Get It’, directed by Margaret Ford, for which I wrote most of the original music.
  • ‘The Game Of London‘ consists of stories in song of the city in which I spent some 25 years of my life.
  • Ten Percent Blues‘ has tracks that mostly have a touch of blues, including a look back or two at my very short career on the road.
  • The single: ‘How To Say Goodbye‘ is the song with which I considered embarrassing my daughter at her wedding. 🙂
  • ‘Dinosaur Tracks‘ are mostly of demo quality, quite a lot leaning towards blues.
  • ‘Cold Iron‘ puts together most of my songs of social commentary.
  • ‘Kitsch And Canoodle‘ – songs of love, lust and obsession. Probably describes most of my current repertoire.
  • Upcountry‘ – songs with a loosely rural theme, some in a country/blues/folk idiom, plus some settings of verse by Kipling, Housman and Yeats.
  • Single: ‘Song Of Chivalry‘ – originally posted to try out a different distributor, but same version subsequently added to Bandcamp. NB this is not the same version as the one on Tears of Morning.
  • Back In Free Fall – Part 1 of a collection of instrumentals that will be the musical backbone of a music-and-poetry project.
  • Single: Back In Free Fall – a guitar piece played on my electro-classic, with a vaguely Renaissance feel.
  • Still In Free Fall – Part 2 of the instrumental collection.
  • Born To Be Mild: 1st Demo Album – first of a set of albums where the tracks are not really commercial-quality recordings, but I’m putting them out because I think the songs are better than the performances. If and when my health improves, I’ll certainly revisit some of them. The first batch is mostly my settings to verse by Housman, Kipling and Hood.
  •  The Duke Of Haphazard: 2nd Demo Album – second in the set…
  •  The Old Man Laughs – not part of the demo collection.
  • Album: Demo Album 3 – still under construction.
  • Album: Nobody’s Song – still under construction.

David A. Harley