The Wrong Side of the Tracks

Part of our Prison Songs project - see www.citiesandmemory.com/prisonsongs for full details.

Reimagined version of My Baby Got To Go by Nick St. George.

"Never have I agonised so much over a Cities and Memory project. You see, there are real human beings at the heart of this recording, not something inanimate like a fountain in Seville or a chapel in Bath. And what of those human beings? They could have been wrongly imprisoned - or maybe their incarceration was utterly justified. Were they cold-blooded killers or did they just steal some money in order to make ends meet? Whatever their crimes and circumstances, they (and their performance) deserved some respect. So I pussyfooted around the song for a while, tweaking this guitar break, treating that vocal - and the result was uninspired and insipid. Then I started to think about the train that features so prominently in the lyrics. Trains, in the context of imprisonment are interesting. They may be a means of escape - or how you are transported to jail. They can carry you to loved ones, or away from them. At speed, they can be deadly. So, I stifled my next bout of soul-searching (are trains just too damn literal in this context?), and went for it. I hope John Henry Jackson and A.C. Craig would, in some way, have approved."