Beds and bedding

I was buying something in an old-fashioned department store when I found myself walking through the department that had all the bedroom furniture laid out. Just as I was passing a rather solidly built woman in her 50s (I should say), the phone rang. She picked it up and her voice boomed imperiously into the receiver: 'Beds and bedding'. It was one of those amazing present moments that seem to hit you in the solar plexus and go on forever. How many people in the world could bellow that phrase into a phone with such gusto? How many people had the right to answer the phone in precisely that fashion? I just knew that that moment had changed my day and that I would go home and write a song entitled 'Beds and bedding'. But what on earth to write?

At first I started to do some homework on the internet and collected some information about all the different beds you could buy. But then quickly that faded into the background as I started to write the song. The chorus is light and chirpy:

This is beds and bedding
Tell us what you want
We can make you slumber
On your back or front

The first part of each verse is playful, both musically and lyrically. But then each verse moves into an almost operatic style of delivery and suddenly the lyric becomes darker. After all, some of us are going to die in our beds, and some of our children will be conceived in them too. And are they not too the location for some of our most alarming nightmares? Somehow they don't talk about all this in the shop when you go to buy them.

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