Song of May

This tune was written while I was playing the piano to get a grip on the idea called on-chord, which was relatively new to me at that time. I don't remember if it was exactly the month of May or not, but was surely somewhere in spring 1989. Writing of the tune and its associated lyric were coincided with the time I happened to come across with other notions related to the month; I was reading about tradition of the Maypole festivities in a history book or something, and was listening to Syd Barrett of The Pink Floyd singing about 'the games of May' quite frequently for it was one of my favourite songs at that time. The initial demo recording was soon made, which was followed by making a new backing track of the tune for a live performance of Timeless, a band I was involved at that time. I would like to mention that the keyboard player of Timeless made a really good job on this occasion that later inspired my recognition of the tune.

Written in 1989 / Recorded in 1990

Around half a year later, while I was making a collection of pop themed new materials, I thought it would be interesting to make a self-cover version of this tune. Unlike its initial demo, this time I tried to convert it to fit into the theme, with making use of the inspirations gained through the experience from playing it with Timeless. The audio track of the video above basically consists of this second demo. The sound effects of the audience were sampled from Peter Frampton's Comes Alive album.

The audio track of the video below is a revised version, done in 1997. I tried to synchronise the audio with the live footage of Timeless performing the same track - with making use of the pre-recorded backing track - in 1989. I know it looks a bit awkward because the audio was made as an instrumental track, whilst Timeless had a singer to deliver the lyric. I would like to make it clear that it was not the case that the singer made a bad job that made me remove the voice part, but I simply wanted to remove the lyric written by myself for its immaturity.

Written in 1989 / Recorded in 1997