Watch: 'A Rumour Of You' Rehearsal Performance
“Here it is, the fifth of the live songs I did from Music Bank Studios with this incredible bunch of musicians. Enjoy.” GK
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I wrote this while on tour in the US with Nick Mason. It came lyrics first. I get obsessed by scansion and internal rhymes when working this way, making sure every verse runs the same, and once I have it fixed I won’t break out of it. I like that discipline - I find it helps me to focus on the storytelling more and not be pulled by phonetic sounds I might make up when writing a lyric after the music.
At first, I couldn’t decide which way to take the song musically and wrote three different melodies. One was much more up-tempo and almost a country rocker, but it felt wrong in the end as it took the menace out of the lyrics. It’s a tale of obsession and hopefully ambiguous as to whether the protagonist actually did once have a relationship with the woman that he’s looking for, or if in fact they’d never met. Either way, he certainly hasn’t met the woman she is now.
I nearly titled it Desire is a Hitchhiker but I thought the line would be better delivered as a surprise, a new part of the tale arriving like a new acquaintance on the road. My brief to Toby was to have a pre-chorus of that line, starting quietly and small in the distance and getting nearer and clearer before the drop. In my mind, this was the aural version of seeing someone up ahead on the roadside and driving towards them.
Musically it needed that greasy slouch of a suburban landscape to reflect the protagonists mind set, and the dirty guitar licks and lap steel growling underneath seemed to help create it.