Next out of the drawer

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned there were seventeen finished songs sitting in a drawer, waiting their turn. A few of you wrote to ask which one was next, which I did not expect and enjoyed enormously.

It's "Neon Tide."

I've been impatient about this one for months. It's named for the thing the Gulf does on certain nights, where the water keeps the light after the sky has finished with it and the whole surface goes faintly, impossibly electric. If you've stood on the sand late and seen it, you know there's no photograph that survives the trip home. I've tried. You get a black rectangle and a memory that doesn't match.

So the song is my attempt at the same job by other means. Whether it works is not really mine to say.

I'm not going to give you a date, because I've learned that announcing one is how you guarantee something slips. But it's at the front of the line now, and the rest of the drawer moves up behind it.

Here's the part I've come around to: the waiting is doing the songs a favour. Every one of these had a week where I was sure it should go out immediately. Every one of them is better for the month it spent sitting. Impatience is a bad producer.

Soon. That's all I've got, and it's true.