Behind the Song: More Beautiful Tonight

I’ve long been a fan of Eric Clapton.

Now I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong. This is not a lyrical derivative of Wonderful Tonight, although I sometimes wonder if those kind of songs just lie dormant in our sub-conscience and make their way to the surface in subtle ways. As the band tells me, everything we listen to influences the music we create, some of it is just more dominant.

In actual fact, it was the chord progression of Change The World, which Clapton performed with Babyface, which has long been embedded in my memory and which sparked the inspiration for this song. The chords aren’t exactly the same, but the sound of the second chord – with the F# over the A – is particularly nice on a Larrivee acoustic, so it was just too good to resist putting it into a song. The progression is a fairly simple one, but done to 6/8 timing it sounds a lot more soulful to me on this particular song.

Following on from the previous post – Loving Every Day – of this Behind the Song series, the inspiration for this song came from two different places.

The first is the most obvious: my wife. Tam and I often talk about how our relationship has grown and changed, and how our initial idea of what love is has changed. Our love for each other has matured and continues to mature, and I’m understanding that loving someone becomes ever-more truly selfless as the seasons go by. Someone once advised me to “marry someone who you know you can grow old with”… and the idea here is that as you grow older together, you share more and grow closer with each passing day.

There’s a sense here that life is fragile, and so the “scars” the song refers to are not scars caused by one another, but scars which we hold on to. It’s true, the heaviest thing to carry around is a grudge. 1 Corinthians 13:5 puts it perfectly, saying love “is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs”. So the scars in this sense are self-held, self-made… they matter as much as we make them matter for ourselves.

The second inspiration for this song is what brought about the chorus. We had been invited to perform at quite a big concert, and it got me thinking about about how our songs would be received by a big crowd, and whether people would have a connection to them in that context. We usually perform in smaller, more intimate venues, and so the idea of the band’s music being played to thousands of people in an open-air concert was a novelty I hadn’t considered.

“So tonight we’ll let it all slide…” – the picture in my mind for the chorus of this song is that it would be applicable to one person singing it to another person, or to thousands of people singing it altogether.

This year we were invited to perform at the Royal Show’s rock concert… and it was here that the idea was fully realized.