Emily's Eyes

Hello,

I’m Amy and this is my newsletter Why Sing Goodbye Songs where I share stories and unreleased songs from the archive of my dad, the singer-songwriter Pete Scott.

If you just want to hear the new song and not read the stories, click here.

I wanted to start by saying thank you for the warm response to the song California, which I shared last month. There’s a part of me that worries I’m being a bit self-indulgent with this project but that always goes away instantly when I share some new music and I’m reminded how much warmth and enthusiasm there still is out there for my dad’s music. Thank you.

Most of what I’ve shared so far has been from the 1970s. That side of things has been especially rewarding for me because they are pretty much all songs I had never heard before. But I have also unearthed a surprising number of more recent recordings, especially from around the time of Pete’s 2009 album Why Sing Goodbye Songs and his 2013 album Songs to Sing & Jokes to Tell. Today I’m going to share a recording that I didn’t know existed until recently, of a song many of you may remember from Pete’s live set: Emily’s Eyes.

Pete had an appreciation for an eclectic range of art forms, especially novels, cinema, and poetry. But he was often wary about diving into the other arts when he was in an intense phase of working on his own material, because he found he was so easily caught up in the things he saw and read that it started to impact what he was writing. Inevitably, if something had really affected him, a song would emerge in the following days and weeks. He wrote a particularly entertaining one about the TV series Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (“they had the most incredible quarrel”) which I still remember fondly. I think he found it a bit frustrating to be writing like this because he felt like it was a waste of time to be coming up with things he couldn’t plausibly perform or release. This is the reason that he very nearly didn’t share one of his most popular songs.

In 2005, the two of us went to see the film Good Night and Good Luck at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle, about the conflict between the broadcaster Edward Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Cold War. We both really enjoyed it and it set Pete away thinking about freedom of expression.

Separately, I had been on at him for ages to complete a comic song which he sadly never finished, called Cliché Guevara, about a revolutionary who saved the world one platitude at a time. I’m keeping an eye out for any of the lyrics in the notebooks as I go through them and I will be sure to share them with you if I do find them because it really was a very funny song.

One day, I asked Pete if he’d finished it yet and he said he had a tune from another song which he thought would fit with the verses that he had written so far. He played the partial Cliché Guevara and I enjoyed it, but I was intrigued by the tune. I asked him what the other song was that he had been using the tune for. He said it was for something really weird that he’d written after we’d seen Good Night and Good Luck because he’d been thinking about the Cold War. I asked if I could hear it. He played me Yuri Gagarin’s Banjo.

As you might expect, I was completely blown away and told him it was one of the best songs he’d ever written.

Sometimes Pete would get an idea for a song and finish it within a couple of days. Other times, there were ideas he worked on sporadically for decades before it developed into a full song. Pete’s account of writing Yuri Gagarin’s Banjo was that he woke up a few days after seeing Good Night and Good Luck with the complete song fully formed in his head. He went downstairs and wrote the lyrics out as if he was transcribing them. Then he asked himself, “What the hell is that?!” He thought it was such a bizarre idea that he didn’t intend to ever tell anyone about it and thought he would cast it aside as something no one else would get. So I’m grateful I kept badgering him about Cliché Guevara, otherwise we wouldn’t have Yuri Gagarin’s Banjo, which is currently Pete’s most popular song on Spotify.

After that experience, I would always encourage him to consider whether the songs he came up with that were inspired by other people’s art were worth sharing. And that brings us to today’s release: Emily’s Eyes, inspired by the poet Emily Dickinson. Pete was a bit sheepish about this song because he worried it was presumptuous for him to imagine he could see the world from a woman’s perspective, but he needn’t have worried. It’s a beautiful song and I’m delighted there’s a recording of it. I love it and I think you will too. It was recorded in 2005. Click play below to listen (opens in a new window if you’re reading this on email)

Click here to stream the song for free or download for £1 (or more if you’re feeling generous!)

Thanks for reading and see you next time,

Amy

P.S. Thank you so much to everyone who has downloaded California and Armageddon (and to everyone who bought Brand New Smile in 2023). I am incredibly grateful to everyone who has spent any of their hard earned cash on these songs. This project is a labour of love but it makes a real difference with things like website fees when fans like you buy the music. Thank you.