Chris de Burgh Tribute CD project - volume 7

Midnight Coach

I am a practicing chartered accountant who helps people build successful businesses and make sound financial decisions, and I like to write and play music to take a vacation away from myself. I've always enjoyed music that has a good lyric. The music of course has to carry the lyric, and the words have to move the melody forward, so there are technical requirements to a lyric, but it also has to say and mean something to me. So I've always been attracted to the singer songwriter, those individuals who craft the entire song. They are my musical heroes.
I'm also proud to say that my kids have picked up on my love for music. Both have become quite accomplished, and are now far more technically proficient than I, and I love it when we can play things together. And it is so cool to have them sing stuff I've written, out of the blue, while they're somewhere else in the house. Awesomely satisfying!
I first heard Chris deBurgh's classic Spanish Train album in 1977 and I was immediately hooked on his words and his music. His lyrics were stories, something not all that common, at least in the music I was listening to, and his music and voice were just the right vehicle for getting his lyric across. The following year I saw him for the first time in Toronto's Massey Hall, an intimate theatre with great acoustics, and a wonderful setting for Chris and his band to have some fun and share his music with us.
What Chris showed me was how to write a good story in the short time you have. Choose an eternal theme, love, good versus evil, loss, war...and show how that affects people.
Midnight Coach is a classic Chris de Burgh story....the Devil sets a trap for the down and out, offering a chance at riches for those who have been cheated out of their money already...but the dice are crooked and, losing their souls, they are beyond redemption and God's salvation, and must board the Midnight Coach to hell.
The recording is my first attempt at going beyond a simple tape deck. I recorded Midnight Coach into a Tascam DP-1FX. Midnight Coach was a one take combination microphone and direct line in. Nothing complex, no effects, simply guitar, voice and a song to sing.
"Midnight Coach" did not appear on the tribute CD. But you can download the track when you right-click and "save as" here as a bonus track.
Lyrics:
Stories tell of the road to hell and of bargains made in the night
Of withered souls who'd lost their throws and lives to crooked dice
In all their desperation they were easily enticed
To roll them one more time and pay the devil's asking price
A black shrouded ghost drive a midnight coach full of those who have lost the game
He waits outside all the halls of vice for those the devil's claimed
Their final destination's to fuel eternal flames
The fear shows in their eyes as they hear that driver say
Chorus
Stand and deliver
You owe your soul
The devil is waiting
You must pay what you owe
There's no more turning back
You bargained far more than you own
Now step inside this midnight coach
The devil wants you home
One man we hear, tried to disappear, he'd sketched a map in his head
He thought he could hide and the dead of night would cover his tracks as he fled
But in his plan's formation he forgot that others stalk
That fearsome road to hell until a voice called from the dark
(Chorus)
No one can escape
Once they've bargained for their fate
Not even God has the power to interfere
That coach will come around
To take them underground
It's a certain bet, they're going to hear
(Chorus)
(Chorus-with altered final line)
The devil wants me to take you home