Love Story Notebooks
Compiled from original posts March 3rd - June 30th 2023 with additional comments and editing March 6th 2025.
Dangerous Times
March 6th and 7th 2025
I’ve written and spoken extensively about this period. I don’t think we need anything new, and I don’t think I have a fresh perspective.
So, here’s the first paragraph of Dangerous Music, which I wrote for Cleaning Out the Ashtrays fifteen years ago. Revamped very slightly.
>1994-5 was a bad couple of years. The details are sordid and I will not repeat them. Making Love Story took forever and much of that forever was not much fun. It seemed that my industry cohorts - my A&R and my management - no longer expected every rough mix I’d send to excite them, and they didn’t seem worried about demoralising me with their feedback. Maybe this was a healthy wake up call. It was certainly a wake up call.
We’d had one false start to the project; the infamous Sorcerer Sound sessions. A disaster, and an embarrassment, thanks, not to me not having sufficient material written, I had plenty, but rather to my ignoring it and choosing to work on various unfinished song sketches. Had it not been for Chris Hughes’ input and subsequent leadership, I’m really not sure what would have transpired. Chris’s position was unique - I trusted him, and so did David Bates, my A&R man. Chris suggested we decamp to a low budget studio, with him sitting quietly in the corner, and I was to demo the songs I had written, with no help except from Adam Peters, who was still technically the producer on the project. Chris and I would meet at Aggie’s on Houston Street every morning for breakfast, he wouldn’t go anywhere else after he’d seen Ellen Barkin there, and then we’d walk over to Dangerous Music in the East Village.
At Dangerous, thanks to this plan, I found out what it is I do naturally, and Adam found a way to work with that, rather than against it. We emerged from these sessions as co-producers. I’m a rotten pianist and Adam is great, but Chris was intent that if I didn’t play, then my fingerprints wouldn’t be on the work, something like that anyway, and my two left hand method did seem to work. Those first weeks weren’t easy but we did have a great deal of fun.
It was at Dangerous that Chris introduced me to Tim Hardin’s work. I’d never heard him before. The timing couldn’t have been better. I had a new infatuation and I could also see how full band recordings could be full of verve, guile, and beauty, while still being fragile and not worried about whether the beat was strong enough for the dance floor or the radio.
There was no real soundproofing in the live room, and the air conditioning was not up to much, so we took to recording with the windows open - the results of this can be heard when we decided to feature the street noise during the introduction to (what became the long version of) Traffic. What can also be heard is evidence that we were at last economising - by recording over old session tapes - at the end of ‘Traffic’ that distant piano is Adam playing Tom Petty’s Freefalling from the Bad Vibes sessions, 18 months before. I’m sure we didn’t plan that.
94 2
Mar 30, 2023
I'm not sure there's another notebook of mine with so many songs in it.
This is how this Notebook Project works - I go through every page of every book and if I see anything related to a song, even a nascent idea, its title goes on the Post It on the cover. Then when I'm done with that process I start with a song, find all the notebooks it's in, and photograph all the relevant pages. Occasionally trying to make sense of the process.
What's your favourite out-take from Love Story? Mine's probably Rain On The Parade, which I co-wrote with Steven Lindsay. I never quite made the album that it would sit on. Which is a shame.
An Angel Flew Between Us
Apr 8, 2023 and March 6th 2025
Unfinished.
This seemed so promising. I even noted Chris Hughes's positive reception of the track.
It's in 3 notebooks from mid/late 1993 to early 1994.
Then I stopped working on it.
I don't know why. It is a bit Goth…
I guess I prioritised other tracks... there were a LOT of tracks considered for the album. By the end there was enough for two albums. I only got paid for one.
Things were out of control, in this respect, in the mid-90’s. This was the age of the multiple format CD single release. I think if you bought all the versions of Like Lovers Do that were out there you got about 6 b-sides.
Casanova Smith
Jun 9, 2023
Casanova's Myth?
That seems to have been the idea.
At the start of the Love Story sessions this song was on the list, but we quickly moved on and it became another song that fell through the cracks.
Which is no great loss. It's not a classic. You may have heard the rough mix (the only evidence) on the LC in NYC box set.
This mix came from arguably my most disastrous recording session. Because I had a young child, our first, I chose not to tour Bad Vibes with a full band. Adam Peters, myself, and a few musicians including my friend Douglas McIntyre did some radio sessions and promo type club shows in Paris and Stockholm, maybe UK, too, I don't recall. I do recall the songs Unhappy Song, Sold and An Angel Flew Between Us were in the Paris Black Sessions set.
When we got back to NYC we booked studio time at Sorcerer Sound either late '93 or very early '94. Clearly I did have quite a few songs, or half songs, but for some reason we chose not to record those. Of the tracks chosen, only Casanova Smith was actually written, and the other song ideas were very vague. I guess I thought I could pull it all together in the studio.
Chris Hughes was around. Adam Peters was still technically producing. Stephen Irvine was drumming (he stayed in his pal Larry Mullen's apartment on Central Park!) and Neil Clark was playing guitar. Weird, I know! Douglas was playing bass but Chris fired him and we brought in Sara Lee of Gang Of Four fame. I distinctly remember Sara looking at me, at some awful juncture, in a sad and somewhat bemused fashion as if to ask 'What on earth are we doing here?'
I suppose this was the experience that prompted Chris to come up with the Dangerous Music idea. I'm still somewhat embarrassed to share this story.
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