Sleeping For Years

Sleeping For Years - lyrics

Waiting for fog to lift from the valley
Tentative flower seeking the skies
I offered you love you answered with anger
When will the fog my love lift from your eyes
When you remember what you once knew
I'm only waiting until you do
But until then I think I'd rather be
Sleeping for years
Sleeping for years

Painting your face to look like the others you see
With never a thought for the beauty your own
You are a vision yet you are unable to see
In your bid to be queen you relinquish the throne
The faces you're wearing you'll lose in time
Throw back the shutters, and open the blinds
Until you do, you'll never know you've been
Sleeping for years
Sleeping for years

Soon we will be flying way over the moon and under the stars
Soon, we'll be together and all of our dreams will come to be
eventually

Soon we will be soaring improbably low impossibly
Soon you will be playing Titania to my Oberon
When we stop
Sleeping for years
Sleeping for years

It's had a chequered history. When I wrote it, I couldn't record it on anything. I had nothing. I carried all the parts in my head (Same with No Chevrolet later on). One of the guys I worked with had a sound-on-sound machine and we kludged something together on that. It was the first time I heard it. Later I saved and got some studio time, just a little 8-track. I made a version there. That was the first time I heard all the parts together. I trucked that around the record companies. Eventually after the usual ups and downs I got given studio time by one of the then majors, Phonogram. I was told they wanted two tracks and I could take as long as I wanted to record them. In the event, when I walked in to the first day of the rest of my life, the rung on the ladder I'd strived for years to get onto, I was told the people in the week before me had hired the most expensive keyboard in Britain and passed the bill along to the record company at the weekend. There'd been ructions, and consequently everyone was now limited to a maximum of two days only in the studio. Starting with me. I'm dependant upon multiple overdubs for the sound I want and they take time, not simply in playing them but in setting up each sound, extra time mixing etc. I did what I could assuming Phonogram would take that into account, however, they passed on the results. I was in shock for about six months, just numb. After a time I decided to have a try at making my own record. By now we'd entered the era of DIY rock'n'roll. It was perfectly straightforward according to the rock press, you record your tracks (which of course will sound amazing), you take the tape to the pressing plant and they will conscientiously manaufacture your records. Well, there's an art to recording good sounds and you'll need personal experience or experienced assistance to achieve it. In retrospect, neither I nor the engineer for the sessions had that. When the tape went to the pressing plant, what evntually came back many months later (and then only after some blunt talking from me) was a thousand badly pressed records. The B side was pressed properly but the A side suffered from "Wow", I think you'd call it. They were all off-centre to varying degrees. I discovered that the needle on a properly-made record will go in a straight line to the centre as it's being played. On mine, it swung from side to side, mildly with some, but rather more on others. A LOT on others. The "Wow" effect was heard accordingly. I had no idea such problems existed. I complained, told them I wanted another thousand records as replacements, then while I was waiting for a decision on that got a publishing deal with a small company who told me just to put the whole thing behind me. I had no legal basis for making any claim, they said, as I'd signed for the test pressing (as indeed I had, it was ok or near as dammit to my inexperienced ears). Anyway, hope sprang up once again but no good came from the publishing deal. Six months later the main guy split to go to live and work as a journalist in Germany. I had to knock on a fair few doors to find out from whom and how to get my rights back.

What the song's about is the relationship I had with a girl I wanted to try life with. I was broke and she was very confused about who she was back in those days. Nothing seems to have changed in either regard.

I recorded this at home onto normal quarter-inch cassette tape when I was forty-two on what was back in those days the only eight-track machine that would do it. From there it went onto the web in a RealAudio file, meanwhile the machine I recorded it on packed up so when I wanted to beef it up for contemporary distribution I had to download the .rm file, make it into a wav, import it into Mixcraft, then combine it with the Ozone mastering software (I used version three) and then play around with the presets and so forth till it sounded louder and, ah, betterer too, then mix it down into a .wav file and then into an .mp3 so it can be heard on my Bill Kruse page on ReverbNation.