As I've written a few times before, I spent six months in the first half of 1986 living in a flat on Cranbury Road in Fulham, London, England, and totally lucked out in that the people looking for someone to share their flat had a four-track cassette player and a couple of guitars in the basement --and were really great people that changed my life. This was my first experience with a 4-track, and I had a ball, writing and recording 4 albums worth of music. This song is musically based on two of my favorite chords, a C#m and a G#m with open E and B strings, like in the illustration. Some of my guitar heroes of the day like Alex Lifeson of Rush and Andy Summers of The Police had taught me chords like these, what I call "open-top chords", not to mention sweet "Melissa" by the Allman Brothers. For this song, written and recorded on March 5, 1986, I was playing around on Roy's black Stratocaster, experimenting with the whammy bar, which I'd never had on a guitar before. I figured out a technique for depressing the whammy bar with the heel of my hand then strumming a chord while simultaneously letting up on the bar. This makes the chord bend upwards as it chimes in. I laid down two tracks of me playing the chords, then a third track of me playing the same parts but I'd flipped the 4-track cassette over so I was hearing the first two tracks backwards, and played the parts backwards, so when the tape was flipped back over, I had a synchronized backwards guitar part. With the whammy bar bending up the chords on both forwards and backwards guitars, the chords kind of ramp in and out in ethereal, trembling swells. I recorded another backwards part: a noodling guitar solo. The last bounce was forward, overdubbing the vocal, singing some simple words I wrote.

The song was released on the noodle stranger album. It came back a few times in various forms. In May 1986, I used the same chords with a completely different melody and rhythm for the song "go", And in 2007, I used the same chords with a completely different beat but the same melody for the song sketch "want need give". A few times in the last few years, and even more in the last month, I've played some combination of this song and "want need give" at the Skunk Hollow Tavern's open mic, improvising my way from missing a woman to "only one world to share". It really ramped up towards the frenzy of the "want need give" chorus last week.

Thanks for listening!

Andy

only four words

only four words to tell you
only four words to say to you
only four words: 

    I will miss you
    I will miss you
    I will miss you
    when you're gone
    when you're gone
    when you're gone
    I will miss you
    I will miss you
    I will miss you

5 March 1986
© 1986 by Andy Wyatt