Album Notes

Impossible Songs: Rough Boys.

Fourteen easy pieces done, overdone and undone the hard way from Impossible Songs – new material / reworking / replaying / watching / witching / sketching and playing:

Hunter*
God bless the witch*
Time of your life*
Tragedy queen*
Old enough*
White and red*
The crow wars
I miss that boy*
Totencult
Nobody Jones*
Not Pretty*
Rainbow*
Hidden Soul
Dickie bird

All tracks mixed and remastered by those Roughboys:

Tracks * Recorded March 2006 at Muffel Studios, Friedrichafen, Germany. Produced by Martin Freitag.

Other tracks recorded and produced at Upper Parkhead, South Queensferry, Scotland by the Roughboys, May thru August 2006.

All songs written and performed by John Barclay and Alison Hutton - details:

John Barclay – Guitars and vocals
Alison Hutton – Vocals
Martin Freitag – Bass, synths and drum programmes
Siggi Richter – Keyboards


Thanks to: Martin, Heike, Siggi, Emma, Paul, Joseph, Olivia, Erin, Guy, Timothy, Emma (S), Taylor, Finlay, Jonathan, Gillian and Elijah for champagne, picnics, beer and sausages, parties and pantomimes, long afternoons and late evenings and being in Scotland.

Thanks also to Nintendo, YOP, Google and Mazda for fun, health, strength and transport.

Three poems that may explain:

End

feeling like a loosened end
an unwrapped ball of string
wondering when I clambered down
where I misplaced the will to sing

secrets splashed across the screen
naked offering to the crowd
weighed and judged with nothing known
forbidden feelings now so loud

needing things we dare not seek
holding tight to histories
missing times we\'ve never shared
scared to acknowledge fantasies.

Dreaming of Tir-na-nog

Nations raging as indifference prevails
Night falls and the candles flicker and fail
In the sunset.
Reminders of the explosions in the past
The failures and the final gasps.
The evening draws its funeral watch
The mind claws for its conscious reward
Here are the efforts of the day
All things dreamt and imagined pass away

New to you I come
Tired and silent
To the beating of a hollow drum
Still in a Celtic fog
I lay me down in Tir-na-nog

Celtic beauty, American shade
Turn the world to purple the eyes away
I lay me down in this Western fog
Steal my soul for Tir-na-nog,
Steal my soul for Tir-na-nog.

Hidden soul

Finding that hidden soul
Beyond the places we can control
Finding that hidden soul
Between the spaces and mental folds


Seeing the bigger truth
Picture painted of something new
Explore a language above the clouds
To realise and have no doubt.