OYSTERBAND'S SONG LYRICS

Dear Reader

Welcome to the Lyrics section.

It started life as a facility for ourselves, so we could check on the obscurer parts of our back catalogue in an emergency.  But once begun it seemed logical to include everything.

Or nearly everything:  we haven't included the words of other people's songs that we've chosen to cover.  Some music publishers - for quite defensible reasons - want payment to allow lyrics to be reproduced, and life just didn't seem long enough to toil through the process of contacting each publisher separately.

You also won't find any songs from recordings that are no longer in print, for example our home-made albums pre-1986 (the year we signed with Cooking Vinyl), the limited-edition EP "25", or a few singles B-sides that didn't make it on to any album.

But we've included texts of traditional songs as arranged by us:  we didn't write the words, but we chose to sing them and they're part of our world.

A great majority of Oysterband songs were written by some permutation of John Jones, Alan Prosser and Ian Telfer. After nearly 40 years of playing and writing together our memory of who invented what part of which song can be hazy, so we haven't tried to separate the contributions out.  It's probably true that, over the years, John has created more of the vocal lines than anyone else, Alan done more of the arranging and harmonising, and Ian written more of the words; but actually that doesn't tell you anything about any particular song.  We've all been tough critics and editors of each other's ideas, and that's how the writing keeps going.

On, on...


(With warm thanks to Giolla Decair and Caz White, without whom this task would have taken much, much longer.)

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