Twin Sons of Different Songwriters

Sitting Alone with Time to Reflect On All That's Come To Pass

This goes back around 10 years.

Okay, 11 years. And 9 years.

So it goes back an average of 10 years.

Squeeze broke up. Again.

But this time, it looked permanent. Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford stopped speaking to each other.

And Tilbrook wrote a bunch of songs without Difford and put out a great little album called The Incomplete Glenn Tilbrook... which included this:




Two years after that, Chris Stamey of the dBs released a pretty great album called Travels in the South, that contained this song:




I didn't hear either of these songs when they first came out. I wouldn't hear them until a few years later, when I discovered both of these albums on the same day.

And they both were revelations. Fantastic albums by songwriters that came out decades after they first burst onto the scene.

Fantastic albums that would've been huge in a better universe.

Albums that should have sold millions.

But albums that relatively few people heard.

And more than that... these songs are basically the same.

Yeah, they sound nothing alike. And their lyrics are totally different.

But they both look at the intense longing of memory. And the vivid memories that places can bring up.

Memories of places that once meant love and the promise of the future.

And now signify all that was lost in that love. And in that promise of the future.

Two songwriters tackling the exact same subject.

Two songs that nail that subject perfectly.

Exactly the same. But totally different.