Easy Pieces Notebooks

Compiled from original posts July 28th 2020 - January 22nd 2021 with additional comments and editing March 3rd 2025

• A Blur

• Perfect Blue

• Brand New Friend

• Lost Weekend

• Minor Character

• Grace

• Why I Love Country Music

• Early 1985 Song (Title) Ideas

• Pretty Gone

• Pop Life circa 1985

• James

• Cut Me Down

• Rich

• A Few Commotions Cover Songs

• Her Last Fling

• Big World

• Nevers End

• Almost Songs From 1985

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A Blur

1985 really was a blur.
It was music non-stop.
We flew to America and played a sold out (except Providence) tour. Chris and Tina came to see us in New York.
We played huge festivals. Pretty high up the bills. Big venues in Paris, Rome, Stockholm, Lisbon.
Morrissey wanted to be my friend.
Our exposure actually exaggerated our success. We were everywhere, but we didn’t have any real pop hits.
Polydor wanted this to change, and so did we.
We should have taken a break. More than a week in Corsica, anyway. But we didn’t.
We allowed ourselves to be persuaded that if we didn’t follow up Rattlesnakes quickly, and take advantage of the Christams market we might be forgotten. Of course this was nonsense. But none of us came from money, and we didn’t want to blow our chance. So we just kept working. Thankfully I never needed drugs for this. I was literally high on success and fame.

We told ourselves that none of the songs on Rattlesnakes were written before mid 1983, so why should we worry? We’ll write more.
Well, we got very lucky with Rattlesnakes. And really, we got lucky with Easy Pieces, too. There’s only one real stinker on the record.
But there was always this feeling that we could have made a better follow up.

40 years later, I’m not so sure. I can nitpick. The singing is awfully mannered. The ‘sound’ isn’t as lovely as Rattlesnakes. But it’s a strong record and I no longer regret anything about it. Given more time, who knows? We didn’t exactly thrive when we had more time, the following year…

Perfect Blue

July 28th 2020 and March 3rd 2025

The first song written after Rattlesnakes.

Early notes suggest that there was overlap with Brand New Friend. Or maybe once I’d completed this without using the phrase I decided it was too good not to use?

My first Clairefontaine notebook was bought in Paris when we were doing promo and about to make our debut French performance. The shoe shop entry from the previous (Silvine) notebook is included to show that we were indeed in Paris when I was making these notes. The first page of the Clairefontaine book is maybe my first draft of the whole song. Did we play it like this? I do not recall... The set list entry suggests that we didn’t. Is there a bootleg?

The band went out. Hoping we could perform Perfect Blue (or Paris Blues) in Paris, I stayed in, at our hotel in Place des Abbesses, trying to finish the lyric. From this I deduce we had the basic song structure written already. I was still working when they got back to the hotel. They were noisy. Derek, our manager, was in the next room. I had to get the night porter to mute his TV. He was passed out with it on!

There you are.

I suspect I'm missing a little. The final image, I believe, is the lyric sheet from the Easy Pieces sessions.