Anne: It took a long time to come up with a workable idea for a collaboration. For me, what had initially been an exciting proposal full of creative possibilities became a chasm of hopelessness as the deadline approached. We dismissed initial ideas of playing with words, conversations, random sounds and I feared we might be submitting two minutes of total silence, collaboration was failing to materialise. To play a game requires collaboration and agreement on rules so we started to make headway when we agreed that Matt would write a song and I would keep out of that process as our initial ideas to write a country song collided grumpily. I suggested that as Matt spends his working life at sea then maybe a sea shanty type song might be an idea. He got stuck in, I demanded a chorus, he wrote more and then I picked out a tune in a mournful key on the piano, dictated by the words. I have never written music for anything before and I certainly couldn’t have started without the inspiring words so it has been a true collaboration and great fun as it started to take shape. I thought it would be easiest to sing unaccompanied but I haven’t managed to keep in tune very well and I’d like to improve it but time is pressing! 

Matt: It took along time to get started. I got the sense that we were each waiting for the other to make the first move. Anne had the idea of a game of some kind, alternate words in a poem or just free association, but I couldn’t  get very enthusiastic about this.

Something about life offshore was her idea but I ran with it as I thought it was something I could do. We started collaborating on the words thinking we might do something country and western. Anne seemed to think that this necessarily entailed adultery and even murder. I found this a little difficult to relate to .......

So we came to a stop for a while, but Anne had already mentioned a sea shanty and then recklessly (I thought) said that if I did some words she would set it to music. I wrote some verses, she took them over to the piano and started playing, I wish this process had been recorded.

Anyhow, in what seemed a very short time she had produced the tune and not only that had started singing it. So then the pressure was on to produce some more verses and a chorus, also to adapt things so that the rhythm of the tune and the meaning of the words were not working against each other, this was instructive.

I had imagined that we would have to record some kind of accompaniment also  but, not only was this beyond our GarageBand expertise, once Anne had sung the song it seemed entirely unnecessary.

I knew Anne could sing, but I truly had no idea that she was a composer, I’m not sure she did either.