A Simple Man (Is All I Am) - this is a very rough ‘phone dem’ recording :)
I wrote this song in 2017. It is a sort of life story up until that time in my life, about two years after the suicide of my partner Liane Ashberry (the 'borrowed angel' - see RudeAngel.co.uk).
Maria (co-founder with me of LiveWildLiveFree.org) took me and still takes me to the stars.
This is a lone surviving original phone dem that I found c.2022 on a computer file. It was recorded on 25th April 2017, a few days after the second anniversary of Liane's suicide, and was among many other recordings and lyrics/chords sheets now seemingly lost for ever in a phone collapse, and once stored, now lost, on the hard-drives of old long-gone computers; all collateral damage in my traumas since 2015. Hence the surviving lyrics/chord sheets do not precisely match this recorded version, although I'm confident I'll find more of my original songsheets somewhere.
A Simple Man (Is All I Am) - a rough phone dem 25 Apr 2017
Guilt and blaming myself, spurred by Liane's suicide, became conscious drivers of potentially fatally destructive subconscious realities. I believe these tendencies were also an embedded part of my personality from childhood until very recently. I thank especially Maria and Nel especially for helping to save my life and for teaching and showing me a way and a light, and I thank Liane for teaching me so much about death and suicide, and for my traumatic growth and fearlessness.
Perhaps I will revisit and record this song afresh one day.
This version also features Nel Kirkland my daughter (Nel Chapman then), singing completely impromptu backing vocals, recorded in our kitchen at our farmhouse (FeelgoodFarm.co.uk), before I, and Feelgood Farm, were cleared out financially and emotionally by divorce and fraud, and by my own self-destructions that are in the past.
And this is a key point. The past is gone and cannot be changed, except by what we make of it in our heads and hearts and souls and imaginings - by our conscious and subconscious energies.
It’s what we do now that matters.
This is a long ‘story song’ and perhaps will be shortened and recorded in the key of B, a tone higher than this version in A, or it might remain unfinished as is.
Songs, rather like everything else, have lives and energies of their own.
Energies can best be understood at the level of the soul. Music and songs - and dance and other ways that music and songs move us - is all, by nature, a soul thing :)
Thank you for having the courage to share a vulnerable part of yourself Alan.
I am still not there.
Beautiful song! Thanks for sharing your story.