Recordings and Lyrics

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Intro:
The time of day, the seasons and the senses – Earthly Realm cycles through these to mark the physical experience of what is ultimately a spiritual being.
 

Credits:
Word, music, vocals and guitar by Roy Hickling
Recording, mixing, editing and production by Ray Dillard
 

Earthly Realm

Spring tints of green
None like the other
Gathering light
The scent of renewal


Sun greets the dawn
Low on still water
Through pastel haze
A pink blaze to shore


Wind in the trees
Whispers of colours
Splashed in the sky
Bound to the earth


Stars pierce the cold
Blanketed boulders
Dreams of the warmth
Of a lovers touch

Taste of your life
And the breath of this world
It touches your face
To guide you home
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Intro:
I learned of Frank Auerbach in a book about him by Robert Hughes. I was struck not only by his incredible paintings and drawings, but also by his story. His parents sent him from Germany to England in 1939 probably saving his life, but were themselves lost in the camps. Frank started painting in 1948 at the age of seventeen and basically has painted, in London, everyday since…this song is dedicated to him.

Credits:
Word, music, vocals and guitar by Roy Hickling
Recording, mixing, editing and production by Ray Dillard
 

Morning Train

Just eight years old that April morning at the station
Your parents start you on a journey, you ride alone
They couldn’t know your parting touches would be the last
You couldn’t know or understand, why you must leave them to….

Ride on a morning train, leave all you knew
Ride on a morning train, red yellow blue

Another morning at your easel, searching and scraping,
decades of paint and life and wisdom, layered on the floor
Charcoal figures rubbed and shifted through ashen paper
An old eraser carves the faces that fade and rise

Rise to a morning train, seek what is true
A morning train of red yellow blue

Distant echoes, rhythmic line, swirling colours, in your mind
Distant journeys intertwine, weaving threads that reach through time


We all have time, we all have choices, we’re all on journeys
We wrestle fate to shape our lives
And if you know where you have come from and who you are
Then you will find that there is strength when you decide to…

Ride on a morning train, hold what is true
A morning train of red yellow blue
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Intro:
This song was the first that I started writing after a ten-year break (although the second that I completed). Ostensibly it’s about my forefathers, what I know of them and what I can never know. It’s really about my motivation to paint and write music and to ensure that my descendants have tangible evidence of my time on the earth.
 

Credits:
Word, music, vocals and guitar by Roy Hickling
Recording, mixing, editing and production by Ray Dillard.
Hand percussion by Ray Dillard
 

Scattered Seed

When the snow melts and the earth warms, there’s planting soon to do
There’s a scent as old as springtime, and a pull that feels brand new
You first knew it, where I’m standing, 200 years ago
When you coaxed this farm out of the forest, tree by tree, stone by stone

In the fencerow there’s a white pine stump with greying fingers
pointing to the land
And beneath it, its rich organic traces leave a painting in the sand

You walked each acre of each field in the hoof prints of your team
Earned your rest along the fencerow, drew your water from the stream
Saved some seed from every harvest, sowed by the phases of the moon
Now I sit up in a tractor and I work it all by noon

In the furrow there’s a horseshoe that was thrown there
and gently worked on in
The hoof beat rhythm and the heavy breathing echoes
like a song played to the wind

Clear a path, but you can never truly know where it will lead
Scatter seed, but does the earth the sun or the rain,
say which will grow…
Or lie fallow

I don’t know why you left your homeland,
I don’t know why you left your wife
I don’t know what it was that gave you colour in your life
I don’t know if you ever wondered where it all leads, too
I just know you loved the soil, ‘cause I feel it too.
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Intro:
About ten percent of my songs are instrumental. This is the only one with a classical sensibility and was written in 1989 and recorded about a decade later. As I practiced this song to record it, new ideas were sparked and I started writing after a ten-year hiatus.
 

Credits:
Music and classical guitar by Roy Hickling
Recording, mixing, editing and production by Ray Dillard
 

Let It Go