Boxing Day Drives Again

As I was trawling through the files for something to put up on this week’s Top Paddock Substack I came upon a bunch of demos for the song Boxing Day Drive and listening through a few different ones makes you realise that these things can often go one way or another - for a whole host of reasons. Here’s one version of the song and to go with it this is an edited version of a story I put up on my website a few years back.

As co-writes go Boxing Day Drive was almost as convoluted as the songwriting process gets. And so it makes me think of the various co-writes I have been involved in over the years. Of sitting with James Blundell and Leigh Kernaghan at one of the Mushroom songwriter’s junkets and trying to work out just why the irrepressible character in the song Never Gonna Get Me Down was ‘never going to be got down’. Of waiting on Felicity Urquhart after she’d been ferried back from Sydney to the Hunter Valley by helicopter after having sung for president George Bush. Are You a Good Man? was the song we wrote that day. Finding myself in Music Row in Nashville with a professional songwriter who half way through the process remarked in an off-hand kind of way “well, Kenney Chesney sure as hell ain’t gonna be cutting this one” (What I Really Wanted to Say). I sat with a book of Sydney Nolan paintings on the lawn at Mount Macedon with Paul Kelly and added a few spare bits to Our Sunshine before leaving him with the barest of chord progressions and a title which was to become In the Perfect World later that afternoon.

In most of these cases it seems to be a matter of trying to establish what you are trying to say, what the song is about. Quite often it’s almost a matter of agreeing on the pre-history of a character or a point where you are focusing your attention. After that it is a simple matter of getting the words to rhyme and writing a nifty bridge that brings you back to a final decisively profound verse that gets you into a repeated play-out on a chorus that people are going to have stuck in their head for weeks after a first listen. Yes, it’s simple really. But with Boxing Day Drive all I really had were the words ‘Boxing Day’ to begin with and no real idea of anything after that. No ‘angle’ to speak of.

It was Christmas 2017 and I’d just taken delivery of a brand new mandolin courtesy of our friends at Auden guitars in England. I took it down to the show we were playing Christmas eve at the Caravan Club in Oakleigh and we passed it around the band room all agreeing it was a fine little instrument. As it goes in that situation you can often start playing some little snippet over and over wondering just where it comes from. Perhaps on a mandolin the simplest of half remembered chord progressions can start to become their own riff. A riff that drives its own tune and ultimately a full song. And so by the time we had played the show that night and I’d fronted up at the family Christmas dinner the next day and then found myself at home later that night the tune was taking shape. The blessed relief of Boxing Day saw me sitting out the back yard strumming the new mandolin in a sort of distracted daze. And every time I played through what was to become the chorus and riff of the song all that would come into my head were the words Boxing Day.

Hell, it was Boxing Day - I had made it to another one! And for anyone involved with Weddings, Parties, Anything in the heyday of the band Boxing Day was indeed seen as an accomplishment - a sort of holy grail to aspire to during the relentless odyssey and madness of seven straight pre-Christmas shows at the Central Club Hotel. Seven chaotic days of celebration which were only to be followed by the commitment and awkwardly executed filthy hungover responsibility of a family Christmas dinner. Most years Boxing Day was the first chance any of us ever had to feel grounded at all. And so I suppose with that sense of relief built into my personal DNA those two words keep returning to me insistently as I began to set up a full set of chords and a tune. As I borrowed sequences from various other songs (as you do) no words were forthcoming. No subject matter other than, you guessed it: Boxing Day.

And so, in the spirit of the way the current album (ultimately Coldwater DFU) was unfolding I thought it was another I would send to Ayleen. I recorded what I had onto the iPad and sent it off into the ether. Well, about two kilometres away to Brunswick actually where she was residing at the time. She liked the tune, the riff and the feel of the thing generally and all too soon she had returned a mostly finished song. A song of regret and rebuilding. Of someone trying to re-establish themselves after a break up of some sort. I suppose it was all right and the sense of sweet remembrance and sentimentality suited the tune quite well. It was all fine.

Except for the fact the words Boxing Day were nowhere to be found. I listened to the end of the informal recording she sent back and scanned the verses she had written. No, they weren’t there.

As it has tends to run with any new songwriting partnership we were both very careful in raising any objection to something the other had written. And so I was tentative as I bought this up and she commented (as she tended to do in this situation) just how nerve wracking it can be to send your idea off to be dissected by someone else. By me. But she admitted she had no idea just how attached I was to the idea of Boxing Day being the name of the song, and the first two words of the lyric. And so she went back to what she had sent me and made a pretty perfunctory adjustment.

Boxing Day

Promises and old songs

Maybe there’ll one to keep

In this fading light

Yes, I liked this idea. Some doleful songwriter sitting out the back ruefully strumming away lamenting a relationship that hadn’t quite made it to the end of the year. It put me in mind of Cold Chisel’s Home and Broken Hearted from their first album. For me surely one of the greatest yuletide lyrics ever produced.

I hitched up to Sydney in the week before Christmas

It was twenty eight degrees in the shade

Home and broken hearted

I been pasted to the telephone

And Boxing Day break was wasted sitting here on my own

The beer we bought for Christmas ran dry this afternoon

On the radio it’s New Year’s Eve

What a low down time of the year to pack your luggage and leave

Yes, we were really close now. I added a few words here and there and refined the tune slightly. Yes, I was sure we had it. Another contender to place in the song arsenal to take to Memphis with us later that year.

By this time Ayleen had already taken off for America in what was to be the first of her two trips there in 2018. I kept working at the song and when I was sure it was totally finished committed it to the Voice Recorder Pro app on the iPad and sent it off to her for a final listen before it took it’s place in the archive. By this stage I thought its inclusion in the form it was taking was a formality. I sent it to Wally and he liked it as well. Done.

(And that’s the version I’ll present for you today folks)

Or so I thought - but no. Ayleen suddenly decided she didn’t like it and perhaps emboldened by her surroundings in America (or the miles between us) thought it was too negative. Maybe it lacked the blind optimism this particular time of the year can produce in people as they look to the new year and find an innate hankering to get started on the next part of their lives. It needed something else she thought.

I was kind of stunned by this as I tend to be scornful of second guessers (And this was second guessing 101 I reasoned). I think the whole experience of the first few Weddings records made me see that indecision is the enemy in so many ways when trying to create art under any sort of constraint. When you read that an album, or film cost some mega amount to produce you can be sure it was the prevaricating, the re-doing of completed sequences and the lack of decisiveness that took up a fair amount of the budget. The fact we had a good cache of finished songs we had already chosen was the only thing that stopped Scorn of the Women and Roaring Days descending into complete chaos. Jim Dickinson came in for The Big Don’t Argue and only strengthened our conviction that it is important to make decisions and stick to them.

But here I was with a fully completed song, and while I liked what it had become, it was in no way one of the corner stone tracks of the album. And we were about to spend valuable time pulling it to pieces? Really?

But wait. Ayleen had this idea that it would be about a drive. A big, five day drive. With someone trying to get to someone else and make something ‘right’. And it could have lyrics about the Pacific Highway and she wrote of ‘loading up this old wagon’, which would ultimately phrase much better as ‘loading up the covered wagon’. And so before I realised what was happening I was well into a total rewrite. And there was suddenly an extra word in the title. It was now called Boxing Day Drive. And somewhere in the midst of all this my wife and I took our daughter to see the marvellous animated film Coco and there was a chord progression that I would never have worked out for myself except for the fact they made the Day-of-the-dead Mariachi character play it visually, believably on the guitar and I went home and stuck that in there as well (even ‘though Wally feels my musical debt for this piece is far more to Tim Rogers than a dead animated Mexican).

(writing out these chords made me realise, there’s not a whole lot to this song in some regards)

I had emailed Ayleen back with a rough of how the new verses might run, all the time hanging onto the chorus she had written which was more or less the only bit to survive each incarnation of the song. She came up with the line ‘on the road to make it right’ which was a really fitting way for the chorus to finish each time and so all it needed was colour I thought. It needed context.

And what comes to mind when I think of the Great Pacific Highway? Road signs of course! Road signs and traffic snarls as you enter various towns where the traffic seems to be perennially cut down to one lane because of FUCKING ROADWORKS. What’s the first thing a person walking into a back yard celebration somewhere after a monster drive is going to say when asked how the drive was? Single lane, fucking roadworks. Of course they’ll say that. Of course they will.

And so I emailed Ayleen wherever she was sojourning in the states and asked how she felt about the profanity and the barrage of road signs in the bridge bit and she loved it all. She loved it and I did too and it was easy to see now it could actually be a corner stone track on the album. Hell - it could (would) even be the opening track of the album.

Kevin Houston called it a ‘power pop masterpiece’ reminding us that Jim Dickinson had recorded Alex Chilton and therefore Memphis was one of the homes of the power pop genre. Boo Mitchell from Royal studios sat in on a later playback and gave us the definitive quote of the session:

“Damn that’s some badass shit - you went down the hill and then you came back up again”

And even though I am pretty sure he was referring to the general arrangement of the recorded version maybe in some way he uncannily referenced the writing process of the song. Where we did in fact, go down the hill and then come back up again. It was protracted and inefficient from my viewpoint, but ultimately rewarding and that’s why you write with other people - to try and creep up on yourself in some quiet way. It’s not how I set out to write songs initially but I think you take ‘em where you find ‘em and that’s how we found this one.

Here’s a version of the song that it well might have been. Boxing Day - you’ll note - no ‘drive’.