'Deep In The Heart'

There Is No Other Way

Everybody has to have a ballad somewhere in their catalogue. This one's ours.

The ballad was de rigeur in a set. Somewhere you had to slow right down and croon and strum out a song of professed love and devotion to some love interest. I didn't like this unspoken rule we inherited from other bands. Some bands did their ballads really well Cold Chisel's 'When the War is Over' is a wonderful ballad that fits seamlessly into their sonic landscape. Paul McCartney's 'My Love' in 'Rock Show' is like the pinnacle work where the slow number just reinforces the richness of his song writing.

Of course there's lot of temperament issues to do with this sort of thing. As I've written on many an occasion, I'm not great with love songs, partly because romanticism died in me pretty hard in my 20s. Life in its raw reality is pretty sobering, and once you sober up from love, you just never come back to it with the same abandon of a romantic. You judge your distance, and just how far you're willing to jump before you make your running jump. You don't give your heart away so some maniac can put it on a spit and eat it ("...what are you crazy?").

Ultimately, slowing down for a bit of romanticism just wasn't my temperament back then. All the same you end up writing one of these things pretty much in spite of one self because man does not rock out at 145bpm alone. We sing things we would not admit to in plain prose.

And somewhere deep in the heart, love resides in spite of all our hurt feelings (they say).


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