No Law
There's no law against love.
No Law Against Love - by impossible songs.
If it hadn’t been pieced together by a half-arsed, unprofessional hack, I might call this video almost respectable. Still, it’s only a frame for a piece, a set of images. The song is the thing.
Ali and I wrote it slowly, letting it take shape over time, before recording it in Friedrichshafen, Germany, with our old friend Martin Freitag at the controls. Martin gave it form; bass, synth arrangements, the feel of the backing, while Siggi Richter coloured it in with restrained, tasteful keys. Ali Graham carries the tune with a sultry vocal performance. I sit quietly in the mix on minimalist guitar. It was 2017. One of four pieces gathered up on the EP In Another World.
I was hoping for a kind of yacht rock softness, maybe a distant echo of Steely Dan. You have to try things. Then, in the second verse, a “list” appeared, uninvited, somewhere between soap, water and thought, it arrived in the shower actually. Not quite a list song, but enough to tilt in that direction. A bit of a niche thing that a listener might just appreciate.
The video followed later, sparked by loose talk of slow cocktail bars in Edinburgh, life in recording studios and imagined sunlit Moroccan interiors; fragments that somehow settled into and shared the same unhurried atmosphere. Another world, of sorts. I can confess now, hands up, I was that hack.
Since then, the song has drifted along, out and away onto the wider digital currents, occasionally labelled by who knows who as “jazz”, which feels as good a home as any. I don’t complain about these things. A genre is just a genre. Songs make their own way in the end, overlooked, rediscovered, or quietly held onto. Like a kite slipping free, it disappears into it’s own blue slice of sky. If it crosses your path, be gentle with it.