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Composer:   Ed Hooke
Date of Composition:   March 1982
Date of Recording/Copyright:    2016

Commentary
I don’t often revisit old songs but a number of factors persuaded me to do so with ‘Transient’.  I felt I hadn’t done it justice originally (which is probably true of a lot of my recordings), but a lot of changes in my life , some of which heightened my sense of my own mortality coincided with me choosing this song-title as a supposedly temporary online chat nickname.

The music was inspired by hearing a friend playing around with a guitar at the same time as another friend was separately playing around with a bass guitar.  By chance, an E major guitar chord was played over a bass guitar playing A A D D and the idea for the song was born.

Soon after I first recorded ‘Transient’, a girl I liked at the time asked me “why does your music always have to be so loud and full-on all the time?”  I hope I have rectified that here, if somewhat belatedly.

Caterpillars are pretty ugly creatures
- blatant parasites as well
but when the time comes they go to sleep
and when they wake they’ve changed into butterflies

- things of beauty
- round the hedgerows
- for the summer

Around in circles
around a star
we go.

(Here today, tomorrow gone from this transient existence.)

But when they shrivel up and die
no-one seems to notice
the victims of the Autumn clear-out

- an unenvisaged future
- their minds filled up with their own beauty.
There will be more of them next year.