This song started as a bit of a songwriting exercise, but I quickly found myself tapping into feelings and memories that I have cherished, but had perhaps not acknowledged properly before.

I think its an illustration of how you mustn’t just sit around waiting for inspiration to strike. With this song, I sat down to just do an exercise, and the inspiration followed.

The brief I was responding to was set by the UK Songwriting Contest and involved writing a new piece of music for the classic Beatles song Yesterday. Music always comes easier to me, so I was drawn to this exercise. I tried a few things, including an up-tempo version that I may do more with in the future, but I settled on something slower as it seemed more emotive and filled with longing.

Once I had this piece of music, I thought, I wonder if I could write a new lyric to the melody of Yesterday. I’d heard that this is a method Tom Robinson uses; there’s a great interview with him as part of the Soda Jerker on Songwriting podcast series where he talks about this. You can check that out [here]

So I was looking for a three syllable word to replace Yesterday and, all of a sudden, Baltimore was in my mind. With that as my title and guiding star, I set about writing lines for the rest of the Yesterday melody. The lyric soon morphed into a set of wonderfully fond recollections about my time in Baltimore (actually, in the early fall of 93) and about the happy month I spent with a close-knit set of amazing friends there.

I then combined my new lyric and my new music, and the first version of Baltimore was born.

Though it was written as part of a kind of challenge, it all comes from a very authentic place; all, that is, except for the reference to 94. We arrived into Baltimore in the early evening, our friend collecting us from Washington Dulles Airport and driving us along the Chesapeake shore back to their place. We spent some lovely times in Harbour Place and did take the water taxi, out to Fells Point for some drinks at Mike’s Bar (where Newcastle Brown Ale was available on tap). We went to see the Orioles one amazing night, and though my friend tried many times to explain, I never did feel I properly understood the rules of baseball.

As well as being about trying to evoke those wonderful times, the song is also a bit of a lament. I guess I’m posing the question of how it is we allow ourselves to drift apart from people we love? How it is that we can feel so close; so much part of one another’s lives, and then let that closeness slip through our fingers? So at the same time as feeling all warm and fuzzy about those weeks spent in Baltimore, I also feel a real sadness that, in the intervening years, I have seen those friends only a small handful of times; and we have never been reunited as a group.

The classic explanation for this, I guess, is that “life gets in the way”. It does, and no-one is to blame for this. We all went off and made our own ways in the world, keeping in touch when-ever we could, but gradually losing track of one another’s lives. So it is that, just as circumstances can bring us together, they can also keep us apart. But if anyone had told me, back then, that in the years after Baltimore I would hardly ever see that wonderful set of people, I would not have believed it.

I realise, as I write this, that as well as being a celebration of that time, and a lament for times we’ve not shared in the intervening years, the song is also me reaching out to those friends again. I’m blessed to still be in touch with them from time to time. In fact, writing and subsequently releasing the song has brought us closer together again. So much has changed since Baltimore, but I now live with a renewed hope that we can come together again; not to try to recreate the early fall of 93, but to make some new memories, to be cherished alongside those we are already so fortunate to share.