The incredibly talented musician Jon Gomm played a truly poignantly lush acoustic fingerstyle cover of the iconic Radiohead song “High and Dry“, providing both the vocals and percussion in perfect precision with the graceful flow of the strings. Gomm stated that with this performance, he felt the presence of the late Michael Hedges.
I’ve been playing this song for the best part of two decades. For my very oldest fans and friends, this is the one they think of when they think of me, even though it’s a cover. I love the song deeply. …performance wise, this arrangement channels Michael Hedges maybe more than anything else I’ve ever come up with. Not just the guitar techniques, but the vocal, even the bare feet.
In 2011 Gomm was donating the proceeds from his original song “Passionflower” to The Happy House Children’s Home in Watamu, Kenya (who are still accepting donations). The song, Gomm explained, was about his childhood backyard garden.
This song is about I plant a grew in my 10-feet-square backyard in the Leeds inner city. I put the seeds in a tiny tub, but it grew like a Roald Dahl story until it took over the whole yard, then one day the sun shone extra hard and 100 flowers all went “Pop!”. It was amazing, so I wrote a song for it.
