The song Noel Gallagher called “the musical version of God”
There’s no need to tell Noel Gallagher that he’s a musical god…he’s more than happy to tell you that himself. Look no further than pretty much every interview he’s given in the past 30 years to see Noel either hyping up himself or Oasis as one of the greatest bands in the world and how they could have eclipsed The Beatles on their best day. There may have been something spiritual going on behind the scenes sometimes, though, and Noel thought that his song ‘Dead in the Water’ was the closest he’s come to finding religion through the guitar.
For someone like Noel, writing songs on acoustic guitar never really stops. You can be in your hotel room or just fiddling around with a couple of chords at home, and then something will come out of the blue all of a sudden that turns into an all-time classic in a matter of minutes.
It’s one thing to write the song, but getting the right vibe in the studio tends to be different. While the litmus test of any good song is being able to play it on guitar, Noel’s past few albums saw him making music with more dance textures, featuring chord sequences that could have never worked on an acoustic guitar. That is unless you’re interested in hearing some joker play one chord for hours on end.
Somewhere in between making songs like ‘Holy Mountain’ and ‘Black Star Dancing’, Noel had ducked into a studio in Dublin to cut a few live performances for the album Chasing Yesterday. While the version that many people got to hear on that circuit was an unplugged version of the song ‘The Dying of the Light’, Noel had actually started off the day playing a song called ‘Dead in the Water’, which had barely had finished lyrics when it was recorded.
Not knowing that they were rolling, Noel played the song from start to finish alongside a pianist, who added a few extensions to the chords halfway through. Once he heard it back, Noel knew that there was something spiritual about the performance that could never be recreated if he had gone back into the studio.
Talking about the song for his greatest hits album, Noel said that God was on his side when cutting the track, saying, “There are times when you’re in the studio where magic is happening, and everything is working. But then there are times, and this is the only time I’ve ever experienced this, when the musical version of God walks into the room and takes over”.
Given where Noel would be going on Who Built the Moon a few years later, the fact that they included this track on the album is one of the strangest editing decisions he ever made. It’s as if ‘The Chief’ was saying, “Here’s my new vision for what my music is going to be. I’m going to be an electronic rock artist”, and then for no reason drops an acoustic song that is among the greatest that he has ever made.
Then again, maybe it was all designed to be that way from the start. Since songs like ‘It’s A Beautiful World’ hit a sour note with fans that preferred the classic Noel sound, ‘Dead in the Water’ is the kind of intimate song that let everyone know that he could still knock it out of the park with just one guitar in his hand.
