SUNDAY DRIVING SOUTH – Interview with Winston

W:       This song feels like the centerpiece of BPO, not only because it falls about midway into the proceedings, but because the music and especially the lyrics touch on much of what I think is the scope of BPO.

GL:       Perhaps I should be interviewing you…

W:      I take it that means you agree?

GL:       Yes, I think you’re pretty much on target. This song is unusual in that as near as I can recall, I wrote it on guitar and piano, rather than one or the other. Not that that has anything to do with your question.

W:       I would think that listeners would immediately notice the Beatles influence in the arrangement. I also note that some reviewers picked up on the name checks in the lyrics in the bridge.

GL:       The Beatles influence is so pervasive in pop music that it’s very difficult to separate something that would have been a good musical idea anyway from one that consciously refers to them. There’s no doubt that I consciously referred to them in this arrangement, but whether I might have treated the song similarly otherwise is something we’ll never know. As for namechecking the ‘60s pop icons, well, they have enormous resonance for me, for the generations who lived through that period and for the characters in BPO. For that matter, I think Ken Kesey, Jimi Hendrix and Wind In The Willows probably all had enormous resonance with The Beatles themselves.

W:      What do these lyrics tell us about Penny’s character?

GL:       Penny wants to put her past behind her and open herself up to new experiences and opportunities. I think that spirit is emblematic of youth culture in the 1960s and that is the basis for an explosion of sometimes quite disparate things that somehow harmoniously congealed in the collective psyche.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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