A Million Love Songs (Approximately)

It hadn’t even occurred to me that today was Valentine’s Day when I began composing this piece in my head. I had it pretty well mapped out before I encountered two people dressed in bear suits and a young woman distributing single red roses to passersby. Promoting what, I’ll never know…

The Goodbye Look were – are? – a band. That’s how I’ve always seen it. Yes, I write the words and I write the music. And I play 90% of the music as well. And the singers – all female – come and go across different projects. Three different singers so far.

There are other musicians. My brother played guitar or piano or keyboards on some of the earlier recordings. He helped with some of the arrangements. My niece contributed viola to two tracks on the debut album. I’ve always wanted to record with strings – to have the budget to employ an orchestra. Preposterous of course…

The Goodbye Look were – are? – just me. But they operate under the guise of a band. I’d always wanted to be in a band. To have those band dynamics. To record as a collective all playing together. To be like other bands I admired. The Go-Betweens. Camera Obscura. The Field Mice.

The Goodbye Look songs are not organic. They do not shimmer with that sense of a collective group of musicians playing together. They are painfully and all too obviously constructed mechanically. Chipped away at. Or put together in ways where you can clearly see – hear – the joins. Which is not to say you cannot make good music that way. But it is not the sound of a band.

The Goodbye Look wrote songs about love. Broadly speaking their first EP – From The City to the Stars – was about falling in love. And their debut album – Shipwreck Songs – was about the after effects of breaking up. No different to a dime a dozen other bands, naturally. Write what you know. We’ve all fallen in and out of love.

On The Cambrian Line, ostensibly an ode to the scenic train route that follows the North Wales coast, the sea itself tells us that ‘love never fails’. Lovers meet on a train. One of them carries a book of Welsh poetry. The remote mountains of Snowdonia become their territory. As the song’s refrain optimistically reassures us, ‘everything will work out fine, we’re on The Cambrian Line’.

I always felt Transport for Wales should’ve adopted the song as part of their marketing campaign. Well, there’s still time.

Elsewhere, on Sleep for a While, the same lovers put off real world concerns for a day and simply lie back and watch the movement of the clouds above them.

Sometimes

The sun shines

We lie and watch the clouds roll by

You sleep 

In my arms

A thousand miles

Safe from harm

 

Even for the closing track – Trust – where the relationship appears to be in the past, the final refrain emphatically repeats: We've got no regrets

 *

Shipwreck Songs is a different beast. It sets out its stall from the beginning – in Avenue of Spies there is a palpable sense of distrust:

In the avenue of spies

Everyone is telling lies

There's no one you can trust

Words disappear like dust

 

Further Blue displays a more simple yearning:

I want to be in the same place as you

But all I can see is turning to blue

I want to walk in the sun for a while

But the clouds up above seem to stretch out for miles

 

And so it goes. Some songs are less blatant. An ode to the beautiful and ornate Clevedon Pier opens with:

Lights reflect

On the sea

The clouds above

Smother me

Can't believe

That legs so thin

Stand against what

Nature brings

Only as the song unravels do we learn about the narrator trying to reclaim a lost past that, like the tide, has long since slipped away. 

The writer Ali Smith once stated that ‘All short stories long’ and for me I’d say the same is true for all the best songs. Whether happy or sad, they yearn for something. They carry a sense of mystery, because we want something more than just day to day observations, the day to day process of living ,which we don’t need the poets to recreate for us.

A favourite of my lyrics comes from the very first Goodbye Look song, the opener to the first EP:

You came from the ocean

Deep below

Stole my heart

And let it go 

 * 

So what do you do when you’ve lost  your heart? You can’t go on writing about falling in and out of love. Even if your lyrics, like mine, are oblique and symbolic rather than describing real events in real terms, you cannot subject yourself and others to the same thing over and over again.

For the follow up to Shipwreck Songs, I took to nature. I made a series of short films recorded out in the open spaces surrounding where I lived and then composed music to accompany them. 50 pieces of original music. From these I picked eight or nine of my favourites and to four of them I added lyrics. I like a theme. Love. Loss. Nature.

That’s probably where the third album failed. Angels Over Keyham is billed as simply ‘a collection of songs’. Some songs are better than others. Some were over crafted and lost their original charm. The lack of a common thread was a problem. I could’ve written an album about aging and loss – and some of the songs are in that vein – but I didn’t want to submit to that mood. I tried to counterbalance it with other tracks such as Heat upon us like waves, a deliberately romanticised spoken word piece about falling in love.

"Summer arrived early that year, dreams to which I would often return. The quality of the light at dawn. The call of the birds that surrounded the cottage. Heat upon us like waves. Painting you in your blue dress, your lips pressed together, vivid against your pale skin. Somewhere distant, the sound of a piano. At high tide we waited for the ferry to arrive. The sky was clear and there was no breeze. Around us the trees learnt in like thirsty children. This was to be our first summer of love."

So where next? Probably nowhere. The Goodbye Look were a band who weren’t a band. They were blessed with a succession of great singers. They produced some great songs. They were far from perfect, but then what is? They represent my best attempt at being a songwriter and I’ll always cherish them for that.

With love to all of them, my children,

February 14th, 2026