For The Record
Moonlight Over Paris

Given there is a lot of talk about Paris in this issue, I figured it was only right to say a few words about the song for the city of lights, “Moonlight Over Paris”. Come back with me a healthy handful of years to when the group PM is gathered around a table with notebooks in hand, and a guitar leaning up against a chair. We were in the process of gathering/writing songs for our first Record, “PM”, though that fact was not clear to us at the time. We were at Tantara Lodge in Missouri, playing a bar gig making our monthly rent by playing out, and spending all our waking hours writing music. We had management that had written up a two-year plan to get a record deal, and we believed it, and we were going to do it. We’d grab breakfast in the morning with some good strong coffee, write ‘til noon, get a sandwich and sometimes a bottle of wine, and write all afternoon. A short nap would follow, then a quick shower, and get on stage ready to play the 4-hour gig that night. There weren’t many people there, usually, so we even got a chance to work out a few bugs on our new songs during the set. “Here’s a new song by the Thompson Twins” we’d announce, and then play something we were working on. I’m glad that those pesky blackberries and Iphones were not everywhere back then, or we would have been called on our bluff.

Roger was the one who brought in “Moonlight Over Paris” Roger, as you know him, great drummer, and fabulous songwriter. He had an amazing, simple piano part worked out and the melody and chord progression together when he returned from living in New York a year before we went to Tantara. His plan had been to go to New York, play drums with the worlds best Jazz players, write songs and …..? Well, the work was hard to find in New York, there were many other people hunting for the same positions. The avenue left open for Roger was song writing, which you could do anywhere, or at home, and it was always better than simply waiting for the phone to ring. And songwriting he did. When he came back to St. Louis, our hometown, he had a suitcase full of songs that became some of PM’s best.

An agreement we made as PM, was that any song any one person brought in became the band’s song after that. While the original writer had a priority say about the song’s musical direction, all of us had an influence on where the work ended up. So, on that day around the table we were wrestling out lyrics, weaving into them bits and pieces that each of us brought to the table; Roger’s New York months in the line about the New York times, Jim’s and my beginnings, born in a family that heard often heard the biblical references to  “Water into Wine”, Roger’s family lineage, (Alsation heir) that had it’s roots in the Alsace Lorraine region of France. It took us a while to get the tone though. Roger knew what he wanted, but not until he heard it. I’ll have to admit I didn’t understand the gist of the lyric at first……we knew it was magical, so we tried “Candy colored cotton clouds drifting slowly by.” but it started turning into “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”. When all the words were said, like many of my favorite songs, I realized it wasn’t about getting a prepackaged ready made meaning, but there was some assembly required in the listening. The song lets you bring your own ingredient to dinner. The sound, the lyric and the music together seems to point to magic and mystery as well as to the every day reality or the “grind”. It appeals to the dreamer and doer in each of us, and how those two forces are going to wrestle it out day by day.

Songs are meant for singing though, and not for talking about, so I’ll thank Roger for bringing that one in, shut up and let the music play.

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