Keep Right On

Another song that was written years ago but I floundered with the lyrics and never completed until recently. There are several attempts sprinkled throughout many notebooks.

I think the problem was that I had come up with the title, meaning a request to a partner to never change, but Billy Joel had already covered this in “Just the Way You Are” and I couldn’t get his lyrics out of my head.

Both of us can’t really remember, but I know I wrote the strumming chords riff, and I think Robin wrote most of the lovely melody of the rest of it. One of my personal favourites the melodic structure just seems to fit together perfectly. It feels so laid back.

The use of a guiro, (image below) which produces a scratching sound by running a stick up and down a hollow ridged cylinder, makes the track even more interesting. A guiro is used a lot in Latin American music. Originally a gourd was used as the cylinder. I’ve always liked the sound a lot.

A plea to myself to live in the moment and count my blessings. There are obvious sections, like verse 3, that I remember writing on the beach in Ayamonte just describing what I can see and hear.

Any double spaces you see are not typos but a reminder to all involved that this is where I see the pause to be in the vocal phrasing. It may be though, we changed that later, on further reflection and trials.