Lost Songs: Our Holidays

A sad little thing from the I'll Be Your Girl days

René Magritte, The Lovers, 1928 (MoMA)

This song, “Our Holidays,” came along fairly quickly, back in those rosy days of 2016-2017. I imagined it being the story of a fraught love affair set before the backdrop of a prolonged war. I made a recording of it on my phone, feeling like the lo-fi nature of such a recording would best fit the general vibe inside the song. I included it in the demos for the I’ll Be Your Girl sessions.

Because it seemed (at least from my perspective) one of those emphatically sotto voce tunes, I never suggested it during our full band rehearsals. Was it because of this that it was never attempted in the studio? Who knows. It died the death of so many songs that had come before it, a victim of the studio’s natural selection: we didn’t record it, therefore it was never recorded. But here it is, one-take, one-track, me channeling the spirit of a war-worn melancholic, lamenting the loss of his lover, like some supporting actor from Malaparte’s Kaputt. Oh, have you found somebody new?