No stretch as to where this mind is at the beginning of another Memorial Day Weekend. Why it’s in England via Australia, of course. And it’s not the only time (eh, Rolf Harris?) that it has taken an Aussie to revive the British public’s interest in English folk music…actually British and beyond, because who amongst us doesn’t associate ENGLISH with “Country Garden”?

Born in Melbourne in1882, George Percy Aldridge Grainger was a composer, arranger and pianist who, to this day is most generally associated with his piano arrangement of the folk-dance tune “Country Gardens” (collected by Cecil Sharp and arranged by Grainger).

Landing in London in 1901, he established himself first as a society pianist and then as concert performer, composer and traditional folk music collector.  But then in 1914, at the start of the Great War, the Australian who shed light on one of the most quintessential English tunes moved to America and ended up taking his U.S. citizenship, after serving as a band member in the U.S. Army, in 1918.

Born in Washington State and not to be confused with Jimmy Rogers the Country singer, Jimmie Rodgers grew up in a musical household and served in the United States Air Force in Korea.  After being discharged he became a contestant on Arthur Godfrey’s radio talent show.  And RCA was waiting to sign him up.  You might remember his debut hit in 1957, “Honeycomb” followed by a number of other single hits on the Billboard Charts.    

But in the UK no Jimmie Rodgers song ever topped today’s selection, which reached Number 5 in the chart in June 1962.

LISTEN TO TODAY’S SELECTION – Saturday 26 May

English Country Garden

How many kinds of sweet flowers grow

In an English country garden?

I’ll tell you now of some that I know

And those I miss you’ll surely pardon

Daffodils, Heart’s Ease and Flox

Meadowsweet and Lady Smocks

Gentian, Lupine and tall Hollyhocks

Roses, Foxgloves, Snowdrops, Forget-Me-Nots

In an English country garden

(In an English country garden)

 How many insects come here and go

Through our English country garden?

I’ll tell you now of some that I know

And those I miss you’ll surely pardon

Fireflies, moths and bees

Spiders climbing in the trees

Butterflies that sway on the cool gentle breeze

There are snakes, ants that sting

And creeping things

In an English country garden

(In an English country garden)

 How many songbirds fly to and fro

Through our English country garden?

I’ll tell you now of some that I know

And those I miss you’ll surely pardon

Bobolink, Cuckoo and Quail

Tanager and Cardinal

Bluebird, Lark, Thrush and Nightingale

There is joy in the spring

When the birds begin to sing

In an English country garden

(In an English country garden)

Robin (Robin, robin)

Don’t forget the Robin (Don’t forget the robin)

Robin (Robin, robin)

Don’t forget the robin…

It was the summer of ’62 (“where were you?”) and a seventeen-year-old keyboardist named Booker T. Jones and his three musical associates were in the Memphis studio of Stax Records.  The group, who had already provided backing music for a number of Stax artists, including Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding were now backing Rockabilly singer, Billy Lee Reilly and during some downtime were playin’ around with a little (Ray Charles-like) organ piece when the president of Stax Record happened to hear it.

Unbeknownst to the group, he hit the “record” button and liked the result enough to want to release it. The problem was that a record has two sides and he called out for another number.  Fender Telecaster guitarist, Steve Cropper remembered a little something that Booker T. had come up with a few weeks earlier and, just like that, they had their second side.

Except that the second side was even better than the first side, which was confirmed when a Memphis radio station got a pre-release (before the “band” even had a name) and played it four times in a row.  So the original song, “Behave Yourself” became the B-Side and the second song became the A-Side.

Called “Green Onions” (after a studio cat whose way of walking inspired the riff) It peaked at Number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was the Number 1 Single on the Soul Chart for an unprecedented four straight weeks.   Interestingly, it reached Number 7 on the UK Singes Chart in 1980.

By then, of course, the band had long been known as Booker T. & the M.G.’s, one of the most respected and prolific instrumental groups of the early 1960s. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, Booker T. & the M.G.’s was also one of the first racially integrated rock groups (Steve Cropper and later, Donald Duck Dunn were both white) in an era when soul, especially Memphis soul, was pretty much exclusive to the black cultural scene.

LISTEN TO TODAY’S SELECTION – Friday 25 May

He was the first non-British act to be signed on by Apple Records. Paul McCartney’s exact words were, “Wow, he’s great!”

As a matter of fact his debut (eponymous) album, released in 1968, was recorded at Trident Studios while the Beatles were recording the “White Album” and both McCartney and George Harrison were (uncredited) backing musicians on one of the album’s tracks. What’s more, the title of another of the album’s tracks, “Something in the Way She Moves” provided Harrison (as he himself divulged) with the starting point for his quintessential song, “Something”. 

He was born 20 years before, in 1948, at Mass. General Hospital in Boston, where his father Isaac Taylor was a resident physician.  His mother, Gertrude had studied at the New England Conservatory of Music and was an aspiring opera singer prior to getting married.  You would be correct if you have concluded that we are discussing the older brother of Livingston (and Hugh and Kate…and the younger brother of Alex), Jams Vernon Taylor.

After moving to North Carolina, where his father served as Dean of the UNC School of Medicine, Taylor learned to play the cello.  He later switched to guitar, which he took to effortlessly, and by the summer of ’63 he and his buddy, Danny Kortchmar were playing in coffeehouses around Martha’s Vineyard (where the Taylor family had a summer home), billing themselves as “Jamie & Kootch”.

While a senior at Milton Academy (in Massachusetts) Taylor fell into such a deep depression that he found the need to commit himself into nearby McClean Hospital, where he was treated with Thorazine and earned his high school diploma from the hospital’s association with Arlington High School. He has since referred to his mental health struggles as an innate part of his personality (“I have these feelings…”) and maintains that his nine-month stay at McLean saved his life. Both Livingston and Kate would also become patients/students there.

After checking himself out of McLean, Taylor joined Kortchmar and some friends in New York, where they formed a band called The Flying Machine and played a number of songs that Taylor had written while at McLean (including today’s selection). Unfortunately this was also a time when “I learned a lot about music and too much about drugs,” he later admitted about the heroin addiction that helped to break up his band and left him strung-out and broke.

After receiving a desperate call one night, his father flew to New York, rented a car, and drove through the night with his son, back to North Carolina and six months of rehab.  The following year, funded by a small inheritance, Taylor moved to London (variously living in Chelsea, Belgravia and Notting Hill) and managed to present some old demos to Peter Asher (once of Peter and Gordon fame and then A&R head of Apple Records).  Which brings us back to “Wow, he’s great!”

Although a critical success, that debut album, “James Taylor” was not initially a commercial success due to Taylor’s inability to promote it after slipping back into addiction, followed by a serious motorcycle accident that left him with two broken hands.

That James Taylor would ultimately be rated as one of the “Top 100 Artists of All Time” by “Rolling Stone Magazine” is no surprise to us today, but first came a time when the man paid his dues in demons.

LISTEN TO TODAY’S SELECTION – Thursday 23 May

Sunshine, Sunshine

Sounds of laughter here comes Sunshine

Smiling faces all around

They possess you, bless you Sunshine

Now you can never let them down

I say Sunshine

Sunshine, Sunshine

Is that a cloud across your smile

Or did you dream again last night

It’s best you rest inside a while

As blue doesn’t seem to suit you right

Things ain’t what they used to be

Pain and rain and misery

Illness in the family

And Sunshine means a lot to me

I say Sunshine

But could it be Sunshine is drifting with midnight

And lonely when everyone’s gone

Blue crystal spirits and gardens in moonlight

Leave her weak, alone and bleak

All quiet and grey by dawn

Sunshine, Sunshine

Rising too late to chase the cold

And failing to change the frost to dew

She’s trading her mood of yellow gold

For frost bitten shades of silver-blue

Friends and lovers past and gone

And no-one waiting further on

I’m running short of things to be

And Sunshine means quite a lot to me

I say Sunshine… Sunshine

That July Monday in 1998 was an especially gorgeous day to be driving the family car (a Jeep Cherokee) down the Kancamagus Highway with my three favorite people.

Part of New Hampshire’s White Mountain National Forest, “the Kanc” runs parallel to the Swift River in places, and it was getting to be a tradition to stop off for a picnic on the journey from North Conway to Lincoln.  If the weather’s hot and the water is low, a pleasant dip just above the slippy, sleepy Lower Falls is in order.  If the water is high as it was on this day, the falls are no longer sleepy and the name “Swift River” is best remembered.

So while the kids stood on the rocky shore to have a look at the water, Linda and I spread out the blanket and began to unpack the picnic basket.  Between the forest light, the rushing water and the glacier strewn boulders, Lower Falls affords many a photo op and with Giles already seven, and Mary suddenly five, I wanted to be sure (there are some who are rolling their eyes just now) to capture the moment.

But there are no photos to be found from that picnic.  Having located my camera I looked up to see Giles alone on the shore and staring – thunderstruck – downstream, where rushing river morphed into roaring falls.

I leapt to my feet and…………….there was our blond little girl, around 25 yards down-river, soaking wet and calmly climbing up the opposite shore. When I was able to breathe again I hollered at the top of my lungs and anxiously dashed to a spot across from her, where I coaxed my daughter upstream along the shoreline to a place that was – just – narrow enough for me to hop across some boulders to retrieve her.

Well, now it’s 2012 and Mary’s birthday has spun-round once again.  Fortunately with a memory like that I didn’t have to reach very far for this segue to today’s selection, which was the same song we used last year when we made a YouTube video for her Eighteenth Birthday.

“Daughter” was written by American-living-in-England singer/songwriter/cartoonist, Peter Blegvad and famously covered by Loudon Wainwright III  on “Strange Weirdos” (coincidentally) his eighteenth studio album, which served as the musical soundtrack for the 2007 Judd Apatow film, “Knocked Up”.  All of which is a bit more seque than I bargained for, and I continue to take issue with the line, “blows her tiny mind” as our Mary has a very fine mind indeed.

Somehow I remain confident that Mary will manage to eke out a Wonderful Birthday regardless, and even while frantically hollering it at the top of my lungs, I am ever-immensly proud to proclaim:

“That’s my daughter in the water!”

LISTEN TO TODAY’S SELECTION – Wednesday 23 May

Daughter

Everything she sees

She says she wants

Everything she wants

I see she gets

 That’s my daughter in the water

Everything she owns I bought her

Everything she owns

That’s my daughter in the water

Everything she knows I taught her

Everything she knows

 Everything I say

She takes to heart

Everything she takes

She takes apart

 That’s my daughter in the water

Every time she fell I caught her

Every time she fell

That’s my daughter in the water

I lost every time I fought her

Yea, I lost every time.

Every time she blinks

She strikes somebody blind

Everything she thinks

Blows her tiny mind

That’s my daughter in the water

Who’d have ever thought her?

Who’d have ever thought?

That’s my daughter in the water

I lost everytime I fought her

Yea, I lost every time

Back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, my wife, Linda and I had the grand luck of doing the “Yuppie thing” in downtown Toronto, Ontario. There was a commercial slogan being splashed around about then: “Be Yonge at Bloor” referring to the city’s major intersection of Yonge (pronounced “Young”) and Bloor Streets… and that we were.

With Linda’s office down ‘round Yonge and Queen and mine up at Yonge and Bloor, the natural place to meet-up on any given evening  for cocktails and sushi, etc., etc., was Yorkville, with its diverse assortment of cafes, bars, restaurants, galleries, boutiques, clubs and cinemas.

These days your average commercial rent goes for $300 per square foot, making Yorkville the third most expensive retail space in North America, where well-equipped (or lucky) tenants can pull in upwards of $4,500 per square foot in sales. It’s the “now” place to go if you’ve got a steady income, and so it was when we were there.  But it wasn’t always that way.

Before the Bloor-Danforth Subway station was constructed in the ‘70s…and local retailers were displaced by Holt Renfrew and The Bay…and residential homes and smaller buildings were demolished to make way for lavish condominiums, office towers and luxury hotels, Yorkville was one of Canada’s great bohemian enclaves, dominated by beatniks – then hippies – and serving as a veritable breeding ground for world-class literary and musical figures, such as Margaret Atwood, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Gordon Lightfoot, Neil Young and folk singer, Roberta Joan (or Joni) Anderson, who would take the surname of her (short-term) husband, Chuck Mitchell.

Born in Fort Macleod, Alberta in 1943 to Bill and Myrtle Anderson, after the war (the future) Joni Mitchell’s dad, who had been an RCAF flight instructor, opted to make a run as a grocer in Maidstone, Saskatchewan. The two-block town with a single hotel was lined up along a rail line that ran past Joni’s bedroom, and each morning she’d sit up at the widow to watch the train go by. Years later her parents recounted how they’d actually met the train’s conductor at a party, who said the only thing he remembered about that town was “a house with Christmas decorations and a kid who used to wave at me.”

When, at the age of 20, that art-school drop-out kid arrived in Yorkville (on her first trip east), she had been well-accustomed to gigging on weekends as a folk singer to make ends meet.  But with no connections, and nowhere near the $200 needed to join the musician’s union, she busked on street corners and played in church basements and meeting halls.  To make matters worse, the city’s folk scene had some unwritten rules back in the day, whereby dues-paying veteran performers had exclusive “rights” to the best songs. Joni was outraged, not only was she not allowed to use her best traditional folk material, but the whole damned, deal conflicted with the ideals that the folk scene supposedly represented. And that’s when and where (the soon to be) Joni Mitchell resolved to write her own originals….

Today’s selection is a prime example of that resolution.  Written in 1967 “Both Sides Now” was first released on record by Judy Collins in 1968, reaching Number 8 on the U.S. Singles charts and winning the Grammy Award for Best Folk Performance.  It has been a Judy Collins signature song ever since.

Mitchell herself first released the song (minus the noteriety) in 1969 on her album Clouds, when she was 26.  Then, in 2000, at 57, she re-recorded an orchestral version for her album, “Both Sides Now” (later included in her compilation album, “Dreamland”) And – hands dow – that is the version we’ve chosen here.

“I was reading Saul Bellow’s ‘Henderson the Rain King’ on a plane,” she once said,  “and early in the book Henderson the Rain King is also up in a plane. He’s on his way to Africa and he looks down and sees these clouds. I put down the book, looked out the window and saw clouds too, and I immediately started writing the song. I had no idea (it) would become as popular as it did.”

 LISTEN TO TODAY’S SELECTION – Tuesday 22 May

Both Sides Now

 Rows and flows of angel hair

And ice cream castles in the air

And feather canyons everywhere

I’ve looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sun

They rain and snow on everyone

So many things I would have done

But clouds got in my way

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now

From up and down, and still somehow

It’s cloud illusions I recall

I really don’t know clouds at all

Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels

The dizzy dancing way you feel

As ev’ry fairy tale comes real

I’ve looked at love that way

But now it’s just another show

You leave ’em laughing when you go

And if you care, don’t let them know

Don’t give yourself away

I’ve looked at love from both sides now

From give and take, and still somehow

It’s love’s illusions I recall

I really don’t know love at all

Tears and fears and feeling proud

To say “I love you” right out loud

Dreams and schemes and circus crowds

I’ve looked at life that way

But now old friends are acting strange

They shake their heads, they say I’ve changed

Well something’s lost, but something’s gained

In living every day

I’ve looked at life from both sides now

From win and lose and still somehow

It’s life’s illusions I recall

I really don’t know life at all

I’ve looked at life from both sides now

From up and down, and still somehow

It’s life’s illusions I recall

I really don’t know life at all

You might jump at the answer when you hear that today’s artist was born in Boston, raised in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (where his father, Isaac Taylor was Dean of the UNC Medical School) and that he, um, battled a drug addiction when he was a young man. And you would be correct if you thought, James Taylor’s little brother, Livingston, born in 1950.

As previously mentioned, Livingston has long been a regular presence around these parts.  We frequently saw him in concert back in the ‘70s; sometimes with his band, sometimes solo; once with his sister, Kate. And we regularly see him nowadays, usually with a favored student from his classes as a full professor at Berklee College of Music (earlier he was artist in residence at Lowell House at Harvard College).

Not only is a Livingston Taylor concert upbeat and optimistic, most of his music is – refreshingly – a shade or two beyond being commercially viable.  Take, for example. today’s selection, taken from a YouTube recording of a radio broadcast of a live performance of a song that was initially released on his 1988 album “Life is Good.”

Between mulch and loam I have been doing quite a bit of shoveling as of late; certainly enough to remind me, at day’s end, that I’m now on the better side of 50.  But when a song like this comes over one’s iPhone on a sunny spring Sunday…with those memories of (“a little dab’ll do ya”) Brylcreem in your hair and the absolute verity that life is good when you’re proud of what you do… You too might be liable to hold to the conviction that giving your all to others will bring it all back to you.

 LISTEN TO TODAY’S SELECTION – Monday 21 May

Life is Good

Eight hours with a shovel in the city summer sun

Aching arms and dusty boots and a job that won’t get done

Two weeks pay, spent yesterday and a three-change bus ride home

And the fading gray of a long hard day, not a thing to call your own

And the boy turns and asks his old Dad

He says, are you glad for the kind of life you’ve had

And he says, life is good, spring is in the air

You’ve got two bucks in your pocket

A little bit of Brylcreem in your hair

You go, life is good when you’re proud of what you do

Oh, givin’ your all to others and it all comes back to you

 Some guys are handsome and they make friends all the time

And they’ve always got a buddy, and they always feel fine

Others take the backseat and they watch the world go by

And they live life alone, quietly and shy

But when love strikes, and fires start to burn

And lonely years melt away and finally it’s your turn

And you say, life is good, winter’s flowing cold

And love is forever and it never will grow old

Life is good when you’re proud of what you do

Oh, givin’ your all to others and it all comes back to you

You can go, year to year

Thinking life has nothin’ new

Special things go to others

You’re glad for them but then just like that…

It goes and changes…just like that…

You say that life is good

You were headin’ for the fall

And you picked yourself up

And you dust yourself up it didn’t hurt at all

Oh life is good, when you’re proud of what you do

Give your all to others, come on now try,

Listen very closely to every laugh and sigh

Maybe there’s a reason for all that we do

Give your all to others and it all comes back to you…

…to you

A Shaker hymn composed in 1848 by Elder Joseph Brackett of Gorham, Maine,

It was first published in The Gift to be Simple: Shaker Rituals and Songs.  Simple Gifts was a work song sung by the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing (more commonly called the Shakers, an offshoot of the Quakers).

The world knows the tune now thanks to Aaron Copland’s score for the Martha Graham ballet, Appalachian Spring (1944). Here are two versions of Simple Gifts:

The first recorded by Joel Cohen and the Boston Camerata at the still extent Shaker community in Sabbathday Lake, Maine;

The second by the pleasing pairing of the ever-consistent Yo-Yo Ma and the ever-versatile Alison Krauss.

 LISTEN TO TODAY’S FIRST SELECTION – Sunday 20 May

LISTEN TO TODAY’S SECOND SELECTION – Sunday 20 May

Simple Gifts

‘Tis a gift to be simple

‘Tis a gift to be free

‘Tis a gift to come down where you ought to be

And when we find ourselves in the place just right

‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight

When true simplicity is gained

To bow and to bend we will not be ashamed

To turn, turn will be our delight

‘Til by turning, turning we come round right

ADDITIONAL LYRICS

‘Tis a gift to be loved and that love to return

‘Tis a gift to be taught and a richer gift to learn


And when we expect of others what we try to live each day

Then we’ll all live together and we’ll all learn to say

‘Tis the gift to have friends and a true friend to be

‘Tis the gift to think of others not to only think of “me”

And when we hear what others really think and really feel

Then we’ll all live together with a love that is real

Today’s selection is the first song, on the first side of Daniel Grayling Fogelberg’s first album, Home Free.  Born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1951, the youngest son of a high school band director (“The Leader of the Band”) and a classically trained pianist, Fogelberg found inspiration in numerous musical genres, including folk, pop, rock, classical, jazz and bluegrass.

Beyond the fact that he was raised in a musical household, anyone who has read a number of these ThisRightBrain posts to date will recognize a passel of familiar themes in looking at Fogelberg’s early years.  As an adolescent who was learning to play the piano, he taught himself to play a Hawaiian slide guitar that his grandfather had given to him. A talented multi-instrumentalist, he would eventually play guitar, bass, piano and mandolin.

At the age of 14 he joined his first band (a Beatles cover group) and then began to write his own songs while playing with his second band at the age of 16.  After high school, he studied theater arts and painting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and it was there, while playing in area coffeehouses, that Fogelberg was discovered.

The man who discovered him was Irving Azoff (a recent University of Illinois grad), who had discovered REO Speedwagon (another Urbana-Champaign act) and would go on to represent numerous other headliners, including: Christina Aguilera, Jewel, Journey, the Eagles, Seal, Van Halen, Neil Diamond, New Kids on the Block and Steely Dan.

Azoff managed to find work for Fogelberg in Nashville, so he could hone his skills as a session musician, which was where he recorded and released his debut album in 1972, albeit to rather tepid initial response (it was ultimately certified Platinum on re-release).

However, Fogelberg was soon performing as an opening act for Van Morrison and upon the release of his second album, 1974’s “Souvenirs” (produced by Joe Walsh, another Azoff client), he struck lucky with “Part of the Plan”which would be the first in a long string of hits in a career that lasted nearly to his death from prostrate cancer in 2007.

This, Dan Fogelberg’s “debut track” is unique to his canon of some 15 studio albums, in that it features no guitar.

LISTEN TO TODAY’S SELECTION – Saturday 19 May

To The Morning

Watching the sun

Watching it come

Watching it come up over the rooftops.

Cloudy and warm

Maybe a storm

You can never quite tell

From the morning

And it’s going to be a day

There is really no way to say no

To the morning

Yes it’s going to be a day

There is really nothing left to

Say but

Come on morning

Waiting for mail

Maybe a tale

From an old friend

Or even a lover

Sometimes there’s none

But we have fun

Thinking of all who might

Have written

And maybe there are seasons

And maybe they change

And maybe to love is not so strange

The sounds of the day

They hurry away

Now they are gone until tomorrow

When day will break

And you will wake

And you will rake your hands

Across your eyes

And realize

That it’s going to be a day

There is really no way to say no

To the morning

Yes it’s going to be a day

There is really nothing left to say but

Come on morning

He started young, so to say that his career spans over 50 years is no exaggeration. In looking back one can only marvel at his performances with the Spencer Davis Group, Traffic and with Blind Faith, never mind his blue-eyed “soul-o” work;  yet even in his early teens, Stephen Lawrence Winwood was living “the” dream.

Born in Birmingham, England in 1948, his father was a motorcycle engine fitter by day and a semi-professional sax player much of the rest of the time. It was no surprise that young Stevie and his older brother, Muff learned to love swing and Dixieland jazz, but Steve also took to musicianship and learned to play drums, guitar and piano.  By the age of eight he was performing on stage with his father and brother.  Meanwhile, he was first introduced to the organ at church, when he snuck some playing time after choir practices.

The Winwoods lived close to a number of Birmingham music halls and Steve was still in school when he began to play the Hammond B-3 organ and guitar as backup for the many American Bluesmen who came to town.  In those days it was customary for American singers to hire local musicians while on UK tours, and at the age of 13 Stevie Winwood, who was now modeling himself on Ray Charles, was playing with the likes of Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker, John Lee Hooker, B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.

When he was 14 he and Muff joined the Spencer Davis Group and Steve’s distinctive high tenor voice placed him in the role of lead singer.  When the group had their first Number One hit with “Keep on Running” in 1965, Winwood used his earnings to buy his very own organ.  He also began to collaborate with guitarist, Eric Clapton.

While the years ahead would bring Traffic (the ‘60s version), Blind Faith and Traffic (the ‘70s version) they would also find Winwood playing session for an increasingly broad array of artists, including: Jimi Hendrix (that’s Winwood playing organ on “Voodoo Chile”), Toots & the Maytals, Lou Reed, Robert Palmer, George Harrison, Marianne Faithful, David Glimour, Christine McVie, Billy Joel and (yes) the Grateful Dead.

His eponymous first solo album in 1977, was recorded (like some of his later albums) at his Gloucestershire home with Winwood playing all instruments. Today’s selection was recorded in the United States for his 1986 album, “Back in the High Life” (which earned him two Grammy Awards).  That’s Winwood on mandolin.

You may also recognize James Taylor helping to express the same laudable aspiration that most of us tend to share from time to time.

LISTEN TO TODAY’S SELECTION – Friday 18 May

 Back In The High Life Again

It used to seem to me

That my life ran on too fast

And I had to take it slowly

Just to make the good parts last

But when you’re born to run

It’s so hard to just slow down

So don’t be surprised to see me

Back in the bright part of town

 I’ll be back in the high life again

All the doors I closed one time

Will open up again

I’ll be back in the high life again

All the eyes that watched me once

Will smile and take me in

And I’ll drink and dance with one hand free

Let the world back into me

And oh I’ll be a sight to see

Back in the high life again

 Girl you used to be the best

To make life be life to me

And I hope that you’re still out there

And you’re like you used to be

 We’ll have ourselves a time

And we’ll dance till the morning sun

And we’ll let the good times come in

And we won’t stop till we’re done

We’ll be back in the high life again

All the doors I closed one time

Will open up again

We’ll be back in the high life again

All the eyes that watched us once

Will smile and take us in

And we’ll drink and dance with one hand free

And have the world so easily

And oh we’ll be a sight to see

Back in the high life again

 High life

High life

In the high life again

 We’ll be back in the high life again

All the doors I closed one time

Will open up again

We’ll be back in the high life again

All the eyes that watched us once

Will smile and take us in

And we’ll drink and dance with one hand free

And have the world so easily

And oh we’ll be a sight to see

Back in the high life again

 High life

Back in the high life

Oh, we’ll be back