Welcome to Why Sing Goodbye Songs

Hello,

I’m Amy and this is the first edition of my newsletter “Why Sing Goodbye Songs” where I will be sharing stories and unreleased songs by my dad, the late singer-songwriter Pete Scott.

If you’re receiving this, it’s because you have previously signed up to receive updates about Pete’s music. Thank you for being here! I’m hoping to share a new song about once a month. I thought I’d start by telling the story of how I came to find all this unreleased music after Pete passed away. If you just want to hear the song and don’t want to read the story, click here to listen now.

Pete was constantly writing songs. Our house was always full of scraps of paper with snatches of lyrics, verses, and sometimes whole songs on them, whether that was the back of an envelope or a napkin. It was a serious faux pas to throw out any piece of paper, regardless of how innocuous it might seem, lest it turn out to have had an especially clever rhyme scribbled on the back of it.

This presented quite a challenge after Pete died and I set about trying to find his will in a house full of paper. Sorting through drawers, I found them stuffed with notes, lyrics, and set lists from gigs going back for decades. One day, I was flicking through a notebook I’d found, when I came across a set list that caught my eye. It didn’t say anything about where or when the gig took place, but judging by the songs on the list, I think it was probably from the early 2000s. I wondered what the gig was and whether I’d been there.

I knew all the song titles on the set list but there was one that leapt out at me: California.

California is a kind of spoof-Americana song in which Pete gently poked fun at the genre and played around with trying to fit in as many American terms that aren’t used in England as possible. I always loved it when he used to play it live, but it wasn’t included on any of his albums. As is so often the case in those early days of grief, I felt suddenly overwhelmed by loss when I realised I would never hear that song again.

I couldn’t remember any of the lyrics beyond the refrain in the chorus of “oh, oh, oh California” and the joke ending of the chorus in which he namechecked less glamorous locations. The one that stuck out in mind was “oh, oh, oh, Pittsburgh.”

As I persevered with my mission of finding the will, I realised that all of the lyrics for all of the songs must still be somewhere in the house. Lord knows he didn’t throw any of them away! It would be a fool’s errand to try to find the lyrics to California specifically, but I knew if I just kept going sorting through everything, I would find them eventually. So I sent a little prayer out to the universe to send the lyrics my way as I continued my task.

As will become a theme in this story: I got rather more than I wished for.

About a week later, I was sorting through yet more drawers in the loft when I came across a CD with a label indicating it had come from Ken McKenzie: a sound engineer and close friend of Pete who produced three of his albums. The label suggested that it contained songs from the recording sessions for Pete’s 2009 album Why Sing Goodbye Songs, including songs that didn’t make the final cut for the album, but it didn’t have a track list on it.

I pressed play on the CD. After a couple of tracks, there was a recording of a song called Pay Day which didn’t make the final cut for the album but which was a regular feature in his live set at that time. As soon as I heard Pay Day, I knew in my heart what I was about to find next.

I didn’t find the lyrics to California. I found a studio recording of Pete performing it. It’s a feature of Pete’s songwriting that he can make you laugh one minute and cry the next. It’s safe to say that he made me laugh and cry at the same time that day.

There were a few other unreleased songs on the CD and I began for the first time to think about the possibility of releasing a posthumous album. I can remember telling people that if I managed to find 8 unreleased tracks, I would go ahead with an album. I’ll save that story for another newsletter, but will just say for now: I found a lot more than 8 unreleased tracks.

So here it is. California. The song that started me off on this journey of releasing Pete’s forgotten back catalogue. Amazingly, I don’t need to introduce the song myself, because I have a recording of Pete introducing it live on stage in 1976. Press play below to listen.

More on the story of that live recording another time!

For now, click here to stream California for free, or download it for £1.

Thank you for coming along on this journey with me and for all of your support for Pete’s music.

See you next time,

Amy

P.S. I should add, for the sake of fairness, that I eventually found Pete’s will in a really sensible place in an envelope with the word WILL written on it in large letters. He was capable of being organised when it was important.