The song Richard Ashcroft was most proud of writing: “They’re beyond me”
The greatest songs in the world often don’t feel like they’ve been conceived by human hands. They were just floating in the air one day, and it took someone who was actually paying attention to pull them out of the sky and turn them into something beautiful for the rest of us. Although Richard Ashcroft may have had a few of those moments with The Verve and his solo career, he admitted that a song like ‘Sonnet’ transcended anything that he could have done writing it at home.
By the time that The Verve had actually started working on Urban Hymns, it was a wonder how they even managed to make a record at all. They had already broken up on two separate occasions, and it seemed like Ashcroft was starting to become too dejected to write the way that he used to.
Once Nick McCabe came into the picture, every song on the album started to take shape a bit more. Although ‘Sonnet’ is just one slice of the brilliance behind the rest of the album, it might do the best job at encapsulating what the entire record is about. Yes, we all know ‘Bittersweet Symphony’, but this is the kind of song that feels like a long-lost gem from the glory days of rock songwriting.
Despite everyone and their mother ripping off bands like The Beatles during Britpop’s heyday, Ashcroft made songs that were focused on commenting on romance as a whole instead of just making a traditional love song. Whereas Lennon and McCartney would write a song that boiled down to ‘I love you’, Ashcroft wondered what was going to happen when that love started falling by the wayside.
When talking about his newer material like ‘Brave New World’, Ashcroft said that he considered a song like ‘Sonnet’ to be stronger than anything he could have done, telling Radio X, “‘Sonnet’…those songs are so powerful that they’re beyond me. And I think that’s the exciting thing. What’s good is that I’m in a position now where each drop of new material, for what I do live, it just makes a problem with the setlist”.
Even though Ashcroft did single out a couple of solo gems, like his recent cut, ‘That’s How Strong,’ there’s a certain magic that he captured when he was writing Urban Hymns. Discounting the disgusting trial that went behind ‘Bittersweet Symphony,’ tracks like ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ and ‘Lucky Man’ are still some of the greatest anthems of the later period of Britpop, often sounding like the band is being carried by the music half the time.
That high bar hasn’t stopped Ashcroft from continuing his hot streak. Across his solo career, his material seems to be the natural progression of what he was doing in his glory years, usually taking the meat of what he had done on those hits and turning them into something that’s a lot more rootsy than where he was before. ‘Sonnet’ might mean something different to Ashcroft than when he first laid it down, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful when it’s being chanted at every gig.