Andrew Gold – Lonely Boy

Andrew Gold was born into a Los Angeles showbiz family, his father Ernest was a Hollywood composer who won an Academy Award for Exodus and his mother was a singer who provided the screen singing voices for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, Deborah Kerr in The King and I and Natalie Wood in West Side Story. Gold was a precocious talent, writing his first song at age 13 and like many American boys was spurred into a career in pop by the arrival of The Beatles. Amazingly, Gold was signed to Polydor Records in London as a 16 year old while still at school there and released a single in 1967, the year of Sergeant Pepper’s and the Summer of Love! The single flopped and Gold returned home to form a folk-rock band, Bryndle, with Kenny Edwards, a former member of The Stone Poney’s and singer-songwriters Karla Bonoff and Wendy Waldman. The group represented a folk-rock ABBA in many ways, but despite the quality of the songs an album was not released at the time, although they re-grouped in the late ‘90’s to finally release an album as Bryndle.

Musically speaking……

Gold opens the lyric with the evocative reportage, “He was born on a summer day 1951”, before putting the child’s expectations and position into context, “and with the slap of a hand he had landed as the only son”, a nice internal half rhyme of hand/landed keeping the interest of the listener piqued with the tongue in cheek Messiah overtone, Oi Vey! The clever main riff in the key of A that propels the song is a standard 1 to 4, 5 to 1 (A D E A) but the point of differentiation is the use of the third notes on the bass for the 1 and 5 chords (A/C#, E/G#), changing the flavour and giving the turnaround a lovely feeling of never quite resolving.

Click here for download or FREE listen

This is an excerpt from Michael’s 33 Great Songs 33 Great Songwriters book available everywhere eBooks are sold.