magic car - tiny dog records

Late winter, early spring. Forget the red light fever, forget the weather. Get the feeling for the songs right from the very start. Mouth the lyrics through the glass, hold up fingers to show where the verses come and the choruses go. See how it feels. Is it OK? Is there ease to the process? Impossible to tell. Spend a little more time on the new songs, nurture them and pull them into shape. A big arrangement is planned for the end of Downtown with brass, like the Salvation Army and a choir of inebriated angels singing in the big parade as it passes downtown. Put a marching drum in, let the carnival pass out of frame, leaving Patsy to piss in the wind.

Piano Wire lays naked and rusty on a Norwegian beach in another time and place, far away. The older songs are tried and tested, and are well worked. Bob Mitchum and How About You come straight from the heart. We dared to play them slow, the way they were written, when time was slow and nothing was happening.

4 in the Morning is even older. We played it in the beach bars and the street cafes of southern France all through the mid eighties. No one has ever sung the song better than my brother, so we haul him in. By the second take he has nailed it. That's the take you hear - I need a million takes to almost get it right.

John arranges the brass at the end of the song, hand written beautiful quavers and crotchets and the session players play it just as it is.

YELLOW MAIN SEQUENCE

1. TOO LONESOME COWBOY (Phil Smeeton 3:12)

2. THREE CORNERED HAT (Phil Smeeton 3:26)

3. PIANO WIRE (Phil Smeeton 3:30)

4. DOWNTOWN (Phil Smeeton 4:35)

5. NIGHT SO BLUE (Phil Smeeton / John Thompson 3:24)

6. HONEY BABE (Phil Smeeton 2:33)

7. BOB MITCHUM (Phil Smeeton 3:50)

8. HOW ABOUT YOU (Phil Smeeton 4:12)

9. 4 IN THE MORNING (Phil Smeeton 4:23)

10. PHOBIC PHOEBE (Phil Smeeton 2:41)

11. SHINY CATTLE (Phil Smeeton 4:03)

12. YELLOW MAIN SEQUENCE (Phil Smeeton 10:10)

Phobic Phoebe is simple and fast and surely says..."if you're going to jump, you may as well fly".

There can be no one lonelier than a Too Lonesome Cowboy. Knocking about from here to there, looking for a connection and finding nothing, just his reflection in the muddy pool. The crackle of the camp fire against the deep black of the night.

Three Cornered Hat is about self protection. It’s about stepping out of a situation and letting things roll, not getting all ravelled up. Being able to smile benevolently while feeling fantastic inside.

Night So Blue is so simple. It is just a dream of love in a perfect landscape, on a lovely night, with a starry sky hanging over, and a big fat moon. Through the scene two lovers walk and talk to each other. Maybe it is their communication that is rare. Hazel sings it on the breath of the soft wind that blows through the song. She makes it so quiet and delicate.

Scientists call our sun a yellow main sequence star - so poetic, it became the album title long before we began recording. There's a connection with my local pub, The Star, where some of the characters in these songs drink their lives away. Good luck to them all.

Phil Smeeton, Nottingham.

why not sample an extract? try Night So Blue (click here to hear an extract)