In my spotlight this week is a song about weather and intimacy. It’s a song where my soul gets bared a wee bit, so if you’re squeamish or lacking the voyeuristic tendency most of us have, you’d best look away now. It’s complex in its simplicity or maybe it’s simple in it’s complexity, but we thought it would rain all day.

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Picture the scene: young family (three kids 5 and under) ups sticks and moves from Edinburgh to East Clare. I have dreams of community, music and friendship – things I reckoned suburban Edinburgh wasn’t providing, the dreams of a young father returning to his mother country. The young mother, however, is exhausted. Intimacy is dead. I am kidding myself that the patient can be revived. My conscious self is an optimistic one – everything will work out for the best. I think realism is alive and well in my sub-conscious.

This song sprang out of me spontaneously at a small outdoor gathering, probably in the Spring of 2002. As I recall gloom and doom had been forecast on the weather front, but there we were enjoying a day of glorious blue skies and sunshine. The kids were toddling about, there was music around an outdoor fire. All was well with the world – but part of me was screaming out: HOLD ME, HOLD ME, because deep down I knew the woman I loved didn’t love me any more.

A couple of years later, the relationship was over. Sometimes is just rains – boo hoo hoo.

Footnote
In 2009 I performed a couple of gigs with a group we called Burning Bushel and We Thought It Would Rain… was included in the set list. I have a rough recording (below) of one of the first times we tried it out together. In the final arrangement there were some great backing vocals on the chorus, which took the song to a new level, I reckon. Burning Bushel were myself, Cliodhna Donnellan, Paul Browne, Su Hammond and Rachel Mountney.

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