Passengers

Simon:

Occasionally (if you are lucky) you get to write something of which you become inordinately proud and that is the case with this song. I can’t tell you for why except to say that both the sound and feel of the track more or less summed up where I was as a writer at the point of recording.

It’s also another little nod in the direction of Jan Hammer (although this time the nod was in reference to his time working with Jeff Beck). I got into Beck during my early 20s and his album There And Back is to my mind, is a near perfect album and a textbook example of how guitars and keyboards can take elements each other’s sound and reflect them back at one another with a subtle twist.

It also has one of the happiest accidents to occur on the whole album. During one recording session to correct a lousy performance behind my electronic drum kit, I mistakenly hit the ‘mute’ rather than record button on the master drum track thus cutting out the drums directly after the keyboard solo. I liked the effect so much; I chose to keep it going for a couple of bars before re-introducing the drums at the end.

For Dora, this is a song of denial. As she rejects Dominic for what he has said, the two argue back and forth about what the other means to them. In the end, Dora runs away only to encounter her ‘other’ father Vernon in the song Xo Va Yu.