GM: I sat at a keyboard in some studios in Notting Hill which was where I’d recorded a lot of Faith. And I sat at keyboard, played a very simple string part, added a very, very gentle guitar part. My way of making music is very strange; it’s very strange. Generally, I put my backing tracks together very simply on keyboards. In this case, I think I’d added a little guitar. But the moment I think there’s something coming, there’s something important coming, I shove everybody out of the room. I go in; I know how to work the vocal recorder that we use and then I just sing on repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. I sing and I sing and I sing and it’s all total stream of consciousness rubbish that people would laugh their heads off if they heard what I was singing. And then I sang “Like Jesus to a Child” – simple as that.
GM: And I thought, “Oh my God, that’s him! That’s him and me, like Jesus to a child.” And within probably a day, the track was almost finished, which is REALLY unusual for me. And within a week, I was singing it in front of the Brandenburg Gate because I was so excited I was writing again. I could write again and not only that but I’d written probably the most personal song I’d ever written in the space of a day, day and a half, and it was all systems go. It was all systems go from that point on.
I wrote Older within about I suppose eight months, and months I think I wrote the best most healing piece of music that I’ve ever written in my life with that album.
SOURCE: Red Line Interview, part 2 (November 2017)
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