“Somewhere down the road, you’re gonna find a place
It seems so far, but it never is
You won’t need to stay, but you might lose your strength
On the way

Sometimes you may feel you’re the only one
Cause all the things you thought were safe, now they’re gone
But you won’t be alone, I’ll be here to carry you along
Watching you ’til all your work is done”

© Phil Collins (1989), from the album “But Seriously…”

This one has probably had four gestations in its lifetime. There is also a version of it that is on the Echos Of Unmade Miles album and is on this site as Unspoken Words.

Basically it goes back to an old conversation that my best friend and closest collaborator, Robert Pearce, where he had said that as a young father that the one thing that worried him was the kind of world that he was going to leave for his son and whether he could do anything about it to mitigate how the world was changing, or words to that effect. I lazily sat on the floor with an A4 pad and dashed off a page of lyrics and said “there you go, try that for size”, it just flooded out right there and then… and did I take a copy of it?

Can I remember even a single solitary syllable of it?

NOPE!

The second iteration of it was Unspoken Words, which was also something that went through evolutions to get where it is and then sat in an A4 ring binder for a decade before I threw it into the fiery goblet called Suno to see what would get spat out… and I was quite happy with the results of what it generated for those lyrics.

There was though, always another version of it which had another way of looking at it at its heart; and that was the yin and yang of for every good thing that he could/would leave to his son, society would leave something that would be darker and less useful to him. For everything good, there is a bad.

And the kicker being, everything that is bad, is something that we, he and I, and all those around us, are guilty of not only propagating, but also perpetuating to prop up our current lives and the sting of hypocrisy that goes with it, like lemon juice in a paper cut… and that was the version that I’ve sought to bring to life now.

It did poke its head above the duvet briefly at a BASCA Songwriting Retreat at Monnow Valley Studios in 2015, when three of us were kicking around the idea that later became This Time, which was subsequently cut by me on the London Road album… but nothing came of it. Too complicated at the time and (co-writers) Nikki and Alan werent feeling it either, LOLZ.

Obviously, at this stage where its just lyrics, I have no idea how or if it is going to work the way it was conceived. But, I’d like to see it do great things, much as if it were a child of mine that I never had… despite its future being weighed down by all the things I should have done and never did.

Talk about Art Imitating Life….

Oh and just for clarity… I dont (normally anyway) write protest songs (although there have been two which could be called that – This Time and Revolution In The Rain) – and Im firmly of the belief that you dont have to cancel out the rest of real modern life and go along with the greenwashing insanity to look after the planet that you live on. Living in harmony with nature does not mean this insane, heavily politicised zero carbon BS.

Silent Time

Standing on a shoreline
Many miles away from home
Silent times alone with my children
Wondering about what my generation has done

For every fish caught from a holiday pier in the summer
More and more plastic bags in the sea
For every beach that our family has walked upon
There is litter and sewage as far as the eye can see
Feeling so free, swimming in the sea, playing in the surf
Wondering where all the fish stocks have gone
Purse seine’d from the deep where there was never enough

For every forest with its huge canopies
There are miles and miles of urban sprawl
Where there were once habitats for wildlife
Logging and sawmills have seen to that all
My memories of green and rolling hills
Keep fading into the past
Scars in the soil of rails and roads that are carved into the land…

Fo every sight of the stars and the moon
Space junk and drones fill the skies
Where the birds were once soaring and singing
More and more buildings are raised ever more high
The breath of pure nature is replaced by the smoke and smog
And the beautiful sound of nature and silence
Is shattered by noise and the electronic fog…

Take a look at the lights, drowning out the night
I tried hard to make my world good, but for your future, its not right
I took the world my father showed to me
The beautiful world that he had known
And its time for us to hand it to your generation
Only now can we see what the hell we have done…

If you take one lesson from us, my son
For the breaking world that we leave in your care
Dont look after it so you can be righteous
Do it because it is still there….

© Lyrics Steve McCarthy-Hunt 2025