Songs of ‘Home’
This is an ongoing series of thoughts about each of the pieces from the upcoming release, Home, which will be available digitally on March 6.
Home
Our boys, not long after we bought our house
The main melodic idea for the song Home came into my head years ago. I was in the middle of a ‘I Heart Songwriting Club’ program (in which musicians sign up for a 10-week challenge to write one song each week in an hour) and this melody just popped up. I didn’t use it for the challenge that week, but I burrowed it away somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain for the future.
I finally got around to working on it during one of the first pandemic lockdowns in 2020. That was a really strange, scary time for everyone with so much uncertainty. Tom was lecturing online instead of in person at the Con, and the boys were doing Year 8 and Year 9 from home and I was trying to run a Prep to Year 12 extracurricular Music department from my computer without actually being able to properly make music with any of the kids. Added to that were the terrifying unknowns… not knowing whether one of us was going to get sick, worrying about family, the empathy we felt with so many of our musician friends doing it really tough after having lost all their gigs.
Despite everything, I have some fond memories of our time in lockdown. We’re a family of hermits and often quite like just being together at home, so we made the most of enforced confinement. There were chess games, movie nights, playing with the dogs, taking things slow, and lots and lots of pots of tea. It felt like the universe was standing still for a while and, while most of the rest of the world bore the brunt of it, we enjoyed the slower pace of life while it lasted.
When I play this song, I think of that time. It’s lightness and lazy Sunday mornings with no alarms to set. It’s long breakfasts of crepes and coffee with ABC Classic playing in the background. It’s finishing class online for the day and sitting outside, watching the dogs play tug-o-war with a rope, the big one dragging the little one around the yard. It’s cross stitch and podcasts and watching the boys draw or read or giggle while they play computer games.
I am forever indebted to Andrew Butt, my good friend and mentor (who we often call Jazz Dad) for playing saxophone on this song, and for recording, filming and editing a live version of it in 2021. It’s likely that I may not have done anything with the piece, or continued writing more, if it weren’t for his belief in me and my music. He even submitted it to the 2022 Queensland Music Awards, for which it received a Highly Commended. Andrew also generously offered for us to record the album in the studios at Marist College Ashgrove, for which I’m very grateful, as well as for his performance on another of the tracks.
The updated album version of Home also features Samuel Vincent on double bass and John Parker on drums. They have incredible ears and insight, and John really changed the feel of the piece by adding a train beat (who woulda thought?) which I LOVE.
