I wrote Forever Yours on the first warm day of summer in 2011. (Must be a trick: I wrote Good Morning Sunshine on the first warm day of summer in 2012.) I’d spent the day with my friend Lex and we just hung out as friends. Sometimes I underestimate how nice it is to have a friend of the opposite gender where you both know where you stand and never need to question the relationship. When I got home, I figured it’d be a good basis for a song - plus I’d had a nice day and wanted to preserve it somehow.

Lex and I were working together on Chameleon Circuit’s second album ‘Still Got Legs’ at the time. I wrote a song for that album called Everything Is Ending which was designed as a duet and I wanted Lex to sing the other part. As it turned out, my natural key for the song was F and Lex’s natural key for the song was C, which is about as far apart from F as you can get without coming back around again. Thus, I had my starting point, accurate to our lives and a functional metaphor: “we sing together out of key - although we try it seems we just can’t find our harmony”. (The rest of the lyrics were just stuff we chatted about that day, what we’d do when we had money, etc.)

When the song was written - as with nearly all of my songs - it was written on guitar, and I wasn’t happy with it. The song itself was fine, but in my head I could hear what I wanted it to sound like beyond just me on my one instrument, and I knew playing it on guitar (as usual) wasn’t doing it justice. In my head I knew I wanted to start with something quite unexpected, almost as if to say ‘THIS IS MY NEW SONG’ - like the song itself was confident. So that’s why it has those descending organ notes. I wanted to instantly alienate anyone who expected it to be a regular pop song. (I also knew I wanted a pulsing bass synth to start because I heard it at the beginning of Take It Off by Ke$ha and I thought it was cool and wanted it for myself.)

In the chorus, you can hear the solo of the song playing quietly in the background. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned to anyone before that the solo is actually the melody from the first two lines of Frère Jacques/Brother John. There’s no connection between Frère Jacques and Forever Yours that made me pick that song specifically, I just liked the pattern.

The ‘come on darlin!’ was the result of an ongoing attempt by me to put a lot more of my own personality into my music, usually with shouty bits (‘come on darlin’ in Forever Yours, ‘1 2 3 4 I’m from London’ in Jack & Coke, etc). It’s also something I’ve always loved about Eminem, that he’ll do a regular take of a line but then do a take over it in a ridiculous voice, so I wanted to use that trick with the ‘darlin’ line.

Usually when I write songs inspired by specific people, I have them in mind when the song’s being produced, so in this case I tried to produce a song I thought Lex would like. Lex is a musician and her songs are usually on acoustic guitar and have a lot of harmony layers to them, so during the second verse a lot of backing harmonies and an acoustic guitar enter the fray as I wanted her influence to be felt in the song itself even if you didn’t know the connection. I also wanted the acoustic to be audible because I know a lot of people were attached to the acoustic demo of the song.

The backing harmonies work also because the obvious theme of the song is memory, so having some distant vocals that sound almost ghostly was something that appealed to me, as are those occasional wisp sounds (the most prominent being the one at the end of the solo and the whoosh just before the final chorus kicks in).

Finally, the snare roll before the second chorus - I’m just a big fan of snare rolls. If I wanna give a bit of energy to a song, I tend to put a snare roll in. I got that from a diet of Green Day. There’s one at the end of the second chorus, too. I just like them.

Those are all the stories I have, and that’s how Forever Yours came to be. =)