Touchy Situation

Album: Singing to Strangers (2019)
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Songfacts®:

  • The first-ever gig that Jack Savoretti attended was a Bob Dylan concert in a half-empty hockey stadium in Zurich in 1999 - his high-school sweetheart took him. Since then he's been a fan of the great man.

    Wind forward to 2015 and Savoretti recorded "Nobody 'Cept You," a Dylan rarity that he'd heard on a bootleg.

    Perhaps Bob heard it, because a few years later a tantalizing email arrived from Savoretti's American manager. Dylan's manager had some old lyrics that the legendary artist had OK'd to send to Savoretti with a view to him writing music to them.

    Two days later, Savoretti received another email that had been forwarded by Dylan himself containing a couple of poems. It just said, "Here they are," and was signed "Bob." One of them was titled "Touchy Situation," with words that leapt out at Savoretti. He grabbed his guitar, but his efforts at converting the poetry into music kept sounding like a bad cover of a Bob Dylan song. Savoretti got hugely frustrated as he felt if he couldn't make it his own it would be a huge missed opportunity.

    It was Savoretti's wife, actress Jemma Powell, who saved the day. He recalled to The Sun how she suggested a different approach. "Why don't you walk away from it for a second, forget about the lyrics and just sit at the piano," she said.

    Savoretti left it for a while and then came back and approached Dylan's lyrics as if they were his words. It proved to be good advice as rather than attempting a Dylan-style folk song, he made it his own. "Suddenly I felt it was my song... his words but my song," he said.

    Savoretti then had to send over what he'd come up with to Dylan and his people to approve. "The tension was terrible!," he said, but they came straight back and said yes.

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