Hold Back the Night...
Hold back was written back in the 1980's. At the time that I was writing it, I had been going through a phase of trying to write songs that were a little too difficult from a musical standpoint and to a degree, lyrically. I felt that a good deal of what I was writing was becoming a little too hard to write when you consider the song from a chord and melody structure. Or at least too hard for my own ability as a musician and therefore, a little too hard to listen to. So I decided to write something that I could let just flow. Often when writing, I will pick a title and write a song around that, but this time I started with just two chords and tried to keep to that. It was late at night and I had a candle lit just staring at a blank piece of paper until it seemed like drops of blood formed on my forehead. The night was so quiet...I was just enjoying the moment and trying NOT to think about all the shit that caused undue stress and pressure that I had deal with during the day. As I thought more about how good it felt to just enjoy the night, the lyrics just flowed from my pen onto the paper and when it was over, I knew that I had something that really worked. To get around the simplicity of just the G1 - 4, 1- 4 then to the 5 progression I deecided to add the F# to color the D and it seemed to work out fine...then later I added the walk up the the D to the Am7 for even more color and that's when it hit me that I had finally written something that was easy to listen to but that was not just a bunch of straight chords with no real color tones. Also since I'm not a great melody singer and more of a song stylist, in the end I was quite happy with how it turned out both lyrically and musically.
This site designed by Steve Moore, Copyright © 2002