The Noel Gallagher song that took “months and months” to write
There is no set formula for writing songs. Noel Gallagher knows that – the legendary British rocker has plenty of classic songs under his belt, and all of them have different stories and processes behind them. Whether they come in a flash or take a long time to get down, each track that Gallagher has written for Oasis or his own solo project, Noel Gallager’s High Flying Birds, has a different story behind it.
“Two things can happen: With an easy one, you tend to think, ‘Oh, it can’t be that good – it was much too easy. There’s no way it can be good,'” Gallagher recalled about songwriting in 2011. “And then on the other side of that, with the song that you have to rewrite and go over, you have to really believe in it. I know I have to reassure myself that a song is good because it’s just too easy to give up and say, ‘Fuck it. I’ll just write something else.'”
“I really stuck it out with ‘The Death Of You And Me’ [from 2011’s Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds],” Gallagher explained. “But you have to trust your instincts, your gut reactions. ‘Do I like it? Yes. Is it worth the time and effort? Yes.’ You have to persevere.”
“‘If I Had A Gun…’ I knew it was one of the best songs I’ve ever written,” Gallagher claimed. “By that yardstick alone, I knew it was good because I’ve written some pretty good songs. Every time I played it for myself, I kept getting the same feeling. I thought, ‘Yes! This is going to be a good one.’ I just knew it. I instantly knew the arrangement, the words, everything. It was just there, and it was special.”
“That one pretty much came off the bat straight away. The rewriting of that was just a matter of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s,” Gallagher said. “I pretty much got that one first off. It was an easy one, I’ve got to say.”
“Now, ‘The Death Of You And Me’, that one took a long time to write,” he admitted. “There were months and months of going back to it, rewriting words and changing little one-liners as they came to me: ‘Oh, fuck, that’s it!’ – you know? It was quite a journey for me, but because of that, it’s the one I might be the proudest of. But with ‘If I Had A Gun…’, it’s instant when you hear it because it was instant when I wrote it.”
Check out ‘The Death of You and Me’ down below.
