Song for April
December 26th, 2008 at 8:08 am (Love)
My Boxing Day pick, “Song for April”, started life as a song lyric. It was written when I was still an undergraduate student in Manchester, in early April 1976.
At the time I was alone in the house that I normally shared in one of the less salubrious parts of Manchester’s northern suburbs. Everyone else had gone home for Easter, but I’d stayed on, to house-sit and to fret over my impending finals. Worse, I thought I’d fallen in love. (How wrong we can be).
It had been a miserable few weeks. I’m still sure to this day that the house was haunted. It was cold, damp, and the last few nights had felt very lonely. It had even snowed. Yet on that particular morning Spring had decided to arrive. Sunshine positively beamed through the large bay window of the downstairs room where I worked. I could feel the light passing through my skin and warming me inside. And my room looked different suddenly. The corners weren’t dark anymore. Everywhere was fresh and new. Was it love or the sunshine ? It didn’t matter, but the two were both bound up together in the sense that life was different today than it had been yesterday.
I used to sing the lyric but advancing age means I seem to have lost the ability to hit the top notes or sustain them. So, this is the first time I’ve tried to reinterpret the lyric poetically. Hopefully the sounds of a warm Spring day help it along.
