LYRICS:
Oh Saint Eulalia I need you tonight, wont you sing me to sleep just hold me tight
How I missed ya – your life and your streets you knocked me off my feet - How we danced for the people all night
Oh Saint Eulalia wont you sing me to sleep, won’t you visit me in my dreams tonight
Can the people of Barcelona leave you to watch over me too oh this time?
I had to go, oh I had to go
Stick with me if you wanna
And I’ll go where you’re gonna go
Stick with me like no other
Then I’ll go where you wanna go
Oh Saint Eulalia how I need you tonight – from the mountains to the sea - And everything in between
I had to go, oh I had to go
Stick with me if you wanna
Then I’ll go where you’re gonna go
Stick with me like no other
Then I’ll go where you wanna go
St. Eulalia:
This song was another step into fiction, and writing about concepts and ideas as people, and addressing them as people.
In this case the song is about Barcelona - a city that I love and I spent a lot of time in during my 20s. I was visiting for a wedding and wrote this in the early hours in my friends' appartment, sitting with an acoustic guitar strumming it quietly on the balcony. The apartment overlooked a little square where three or so roads met and in the centre was a statue of the city's patron saint - St Eulalia. It suddenly clicked - to write about the city but address the narrative to the saint. Musically it leans close to some of the later Springsteen songs - Wrecking Ball and the Rising albums - blending folk and country within rock, but to give it more of a nodd to a Latin flavour I added congas to dilute the folk flavours and push it in another direction - I'm not entirely sure what direction it is! The raw distortion on the guitar parts and the harmonicas give it some edge and make it more unusual that I had imagined at the start - but thats the fun of it and the whole point of creating music in this way - new things emerge.