After having known Dananananaykroyd’s second and final album There Is a Way for 13 years, listening to it since near the day it was released in 2011 and becoming very familiar to every song on there in the process, I made the decision to buy it outright and get a physical copy back in January. It wasn’t cheap. Almost £20, it was. But I knew the music was good, so it was worth it. A lot of things became clear once the copy came in the mail and I opened those liner notes up. For one, I’d been singing along to the majority of the tracks on there, completely differently to how they were originally written. And two, almost all of the music was written by guitarist David Roy and, bar three songs, the lyrics were covered by John Baillie Jnr, who’d been more of the backing vocalist on the band’s previous album while mainly acting as the second drummer. I guess that’s why those two stuck together in a new band when the ‘Kroyd split up a few months after the album’s initial release.
I’ve gone on a bit of a tangent there. Let’s take it back to the point about singing the wrong words. Yeah, that’s what I’d been doing all this time. ‘Seven Days Late’ is a track on the album where there’s a lot of shouting involved. And being the people of Glasgow they are, they were unapologetically Scottish in the way they enunciated their lyrics. It’s an endearing quality. I could only mimic what I could understand, apart from those phrases where it was very clear what was being said. ‘Seven Days…’ is the most intense song on the album. I remember being sort of blown away by Bailie Jnr’s scream at about 2:20 when I first heard it. Bear in mind, I was 16. But there was nothing from Hey Everyone! that made me think they had that kind of scream in them. Really from the chest, sounded truly pissed off. And I’m sure the whole song is simply about someone deciding to stay in a room somewhere and do nothing until their mum and sister comes to take them away.
Thinking about it, there should be no reason why a simple subject like that should be matched with such ferocity and urgency in the music. And if it does, you’d think it probably wouldn’t work out too well. But that’s exactly what goes on here and, in contrast to what I stated in the last sentence, it works out very well indeed. This track makes me damn-near want to punch a wall. Multiple times or something. That’s sometimes what it has to come down to. There’s a frustration and tension that builds and builds throughout, and when the track leaves you hanging when things pause for a brief second near the end, those anxious feelings are beautifully alleviated by the final chord where the band members breathe an almighty sigh of relief – like sitting in a nice, warm bath after a tiring day. It’s such a good moment, I get goosebumps every time.
The Music in My Ears 