Surrounded - Artificial Light, 2008

Surrounded was improvised. How cool is that?

That said, there's far more to the story than that. The version that ended up on 'Artificial Light' wasn't really improvised, but the song itself was.

It was a late night at some point early on in the recording sessions; early enough so we were still comfortable working hard at it for days and days on end, but late enough so we could relax a little. Ziv was around (read the notes on Are You Still Awake? for more on him), and he, Matty and myself were collapsed on the bed listening to some etherally music.

I can't remember what exactly happened, I think some lyrics popped into my head, or a slice of a melody, but I grabbed the nearest guitar and started strumming away to myself. A couple of minutes in I got Matty to set up the moxing desk and a microphone, and hit record.

I think all I had was the chord progression (it's the same two chords all the way through, with little variation) and the odd line (the 'surrounded' hook, the 'shape me with your fingers' part and the 'I want to touch your soul' bridge), but I played through it, making it up as I went along. I recently got my hands on this original take - a lot of it is unlistenable, with me often failing to find the notes that work over the chords and a workable rhythm. Ziv and Matty sang along with the chorus too, which was nice.

We hit Stop, and kept it. I listened back to it a couple of days later, took what worked and discarded what didn't. The structure and lyrics are pretty much exactly the same now as they were then. This song, although written near the start, was actually one of the last to be recorded. I remember looking at the list of recordings and seeing Surrounded1, Surrounded2, Surrounded3, 4, 5, etc.

The song kept changing in little ways, too. The fluid feel of it made it easy to throw new lyrics in - I still do this live, every now and again. For instance, for a while there was a outro that went something like: 'faith, faith, faith, I don't know what to make of you'. That line popped in the day after going to a club in Edinburgh with a friend of mine, where I ended up outside looking after a friend of a friend. I think that was just something I said to her at one point - 'I don't know what to make of you' - but it was in there for a while, before I took it out in a mad lyric-harvest. The worst thing I could do to the song was make it too busy.

We also had to cut back on my performance of the song. I got a little over-confident with it for a while, belting out the bridge, screaming in parts, losing sight of the song was meant to be. That's why there were so many takes - we'd starting thinking about electric guitar parts, percussion, backing vocals, and the song just started to fall apart. It wasn't until we took everything away except the guitar and vocals that it started to fit again. A bit of bass guitar to add some oomph to it, and it was done, after about 6 months of botched attempts.

Meaning? Honestly, I have no idea what this song is about. The odd lyric means something to me:

"Your strangest dreams, always without/about me.
My strangest dreams, always about/without you."

That's saying something about... not quite unrequited love, but unhealthy love. Unhappy love. I switch those lines about, depending on how I feel. It works either way.

"I want to touch your soul from the inside out..."

That's more than likely a sex lyric, although I'd hazard a guess that it's intended a tad more invasively than purely sex.

Live, I like to throw this song in if I'm feeling nervous. This is brilliant to play when I'm not at my most confident, I think. I remember playing this at the Innerliethen Music Festival a couple of summers back, I think the second year I played there - I opened with it and, I'm pretty sure, levelled the place. I've rarely felt happier about a performance as I did about that one. Good times, good times.

Faith, faith, faith. I don't know what to make of you.