Come Home With Me.
- Tom Monks
- Jan 8
- 2 min read
Three years ago I'd built what was shaping up to be a decent collection of recordings, but not quite cohesive enough to be an album. It needed a strong opening song. One to set the tone and allow everything else to follow.
I was noodling on my acoustic after changing the strings, and the universe went "TOM HERE IT IS". Start to finish. Chords. Melody. Words. Even the bloody arrangement, from the drum part to the bossa-nova bit to EVERY note of the guitar solo. ALL of 'Come Home With Me' arrived fully formed as quickly as the song goes!
I've never had that before. Usually it was fragments: ideas arriving over periods of time. For example, one song has a 2022 lyric over a 2018 instrumental! So to arrive all at once was unheard of for me, and weirdly every single song since has also just.... appeared. It unlocked something.
And I dug it but... it's not something I'd deliberately write. A falsetto chorus? A lyric about sleepovers? That dodgy chord at the end of the verses? A guitar solo so technical I have to LEARN it? I've only got Paramount Plus to watch Beavis and Butthead too.
But the universe said "this is how it goes. This is going to start your album. Take it or leave it!"
So I called my friend Andy Furmage and tracked 'Come Home With Me' at his space, eRax Sound Art in Welling. At the time he'd recently stepped in to play bass for me at Danson Fireworks in front of 23,000 people at the drop of a hat and absolutely nailed it... and then I found out he can engineer the In Utero drum sound!
Andy engineered the whole song (and the drums for some others) and he played bass on it too. I tried to come up with an easier guitar solo, but the universe said "no". So I gave in, even though it took 43 takes and ripped my fingers up.
When 'Come Home With Me' was done, I put it at the start of my playlist of originals, shuffled the rest around a bit, and... it felt like an ALBUM. I didn't choose it as the opener. It declared itself!
And LOTS of people have highlighted it, so maybe the universe was right. I still put my own name on the PRS, even though it felt unfair.
Last CD's in my Linktree. I pressed what I thought was realistically sensible, turned out it wasn't... so grab them while you can x
📸 Nancy Dean & Andy Furmage
