Tommy's Coming Home

“Tommy’s Coming Home” is one of the three songs (the other ones being “Twenty Fine Fingers” and “I Don’t Want To Confess“) written by McCartney and Costello that haven’t been officially released until 2017, and their appearance on the Flower In The Dirt reissue. The original demo first appeared in 1998 on the bootleg The McCartney – MacManus Collaboration. Elvis Costello performed the song live once, on June 25th, 2014 in New-York.

“Tommy’s Coming Home Again” was an unsentimental little tale written about a soldier who is briefly mourned before his widow is seduced in a train compartment.

How could he know that only twelve months later
She would wear her skirt up over her knee
And in the very same carriage she ‘d be flattered with roses
And forget the tears of Picardy

That last line contained a deliberate Anglophone mishearing of the musical term tierce de Picardie, which is given to a cadence in which the melody unexpectedly resolves to a major chord in a minor key. It was also a reference to a beautiful popular song written in 1916.

At first glance, Fred Wetherley’s words seem like idealized Edwardian sentiments about lost love, but together with Haydn Wood’s melody, they came to convey the longing of separation and the despair at the losses.

And the roses will die With the summertime, and our roads may be far apart,
But there’s one rose that dies not in Picardy!

From Washington Post, March 16, 2017:

There was no great strategy as they wrote. It was organic. Costello points to “Tommy’s Coming Home,” a beautiful, poetic song about a war widow torn between mourning and temptation. (The demo is being released for the first time on the “Flowers” box set.)

Costello: Paul made the first musical statement. But if you listen to that song, who do you think wrote that? Probably me, less known as a melodist than him. But I think I was the one who suggested [hums the chorus]. Often we exchanged the role as we were doing it because it wasn’t considered. All these theories, they don’t exist because of who I am. They exist because of who he is and all these associations that people want to read into. None of that was any part of writing any of these songs. It was almost fun really. It was really seeing what we could get. . . . The image of the hawk hovering over the little animals in that song. I said, “How do we get that in the story?” And I had the idea of a war widow on a train, and somehow both of those images ended up in that song. That’s proper collaborating. It’s not theoretical. It’s actual practical work.

Lyrics

Officially appears on

Bootlegs

Live performances

Paul McCartney has never played this song in concert.

Going further

• http://www.elviscostello.info/wiki/index.php/Tommy%27s_Coming_Home

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