Taken from my instrumental album 'A Man of Few Words', this simple but kind of hectic piece started more than 20 years ago as the base for a song. Around 2001 I was in a band called Tomato with my friends Philippe Depireux (drums) and the late Jacky Marchal (bass). It was pretty much a guitar rock band in the traditional sense, with myself on guitar and vocal duties. We had started working on a second album when circonstances led to the end of the band. We'd only recorded three basic tracks and they stayed abandoned for quite a while.
In 2018 I revived one of those tracks which became 'La fille qui tombe' on my French language Fluoxetine album. I had been toying with that track for a while under different versions but this one felt right. While I was reworking that song I rediscovered the other two, which I had completely forgotten about. However I couldn't find anything to sing on those at that time so they went back to the 'unfinished' folder.
In 2024 I heard the sad news of Jacky's passing, which obviously made me relisten to what we'd produced together and those two 'lost' songs reappeared. At the time I was in the middle of recording my instrumental album, so it made sense to try and incorporate those two old numbers. I simply started improvising and felt it particularly easy! I'm not much of a spiritual person but I like to think that Jacky inspired me on that one!
I remember that we originally tried to go for a simple pop-rock base and we only recorded one take of this one, after jamming a bit. Philippe always plays a little bit faster than me, he pulls the beat, which gives it an urgency that you can't reproduce with machines, and Jacky's bass was as full as ever. He used to rehearse through a 3000 watt bass rig that deafened us for days! The whole thing sounded quite hectic in a good way and my added soloing suited the song, so I was quite pleased with that.
I usually create videos to share my music on social media. For this one I immediately thought of Buster Keaton. When I realised most of his films were in the public domain, I tried to put images and music together and it fitted right away. When released on YouTube it quickly shot to 50k views, which is quite unusual for my stuff! Probably more thanks to Mr Keaton than to my guitar noodling :)
David Goffin 11 Feb 2025
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