Track ten on the 2024 album: the one Liam said stops him cold
Mother Nature’s Song is the tenth and last track on Liam Gallagher & John Squire, released by Warner on 1 March 2024. John Squire wrote it. Greg Kurstin produced it, the same producer who cut the album in about three weeks in Los Angeles, with Joey Waronker on drums and Kurstin himself on bass. The song runs 4 minutes 7 seconds. It was not a single. Just Another Rainbow, Mars To Liverpool and Raise Your Hands carried the radio campaign. This one is the exit.
The lyric stays concrete. A river, the sea, coffee, tea, a garden, a park, birds, then dark. Sunlight in someone’s hair, a cherry blossom snowstorm, shadows on the pavement. The chorus names what the arrangement is doing: “The melodies are beautiful, the chords sublime.” Squire’s guitar stays melodic instead of stacking another stomp. Gallagher sings it without the sneer he uses on I’m So Bored. The tempo sits around a walk, near 96 BPM, in E major. After nine louder songs, the record simply slows down and stops.
Gallagher talked about that slowdown before the album was out. On Radio X, with Johnny Vaughan, he sorted the tracks by what they make you do. Some make you want to kick someone in the shin. Some make you want to go out. Some make you sit at home, think, and have a little cry. Mother Nature’s Song, he said, was the one that stops him.
For the one that makes me emotional, Mother Nature’s Song is a killer. It’s absolutely beautiful and it sort of really stops me in me tracks and makes me think.
(Liam Gallagher to Johnny Vaughan, Radio X, 2024)
In a Sunday Times interview around the same time he refused to turn the song into a lecture. Younger Liam, he said, was not interested in a walk unless it ended at the pub. Older Liam has a dog and ends up in the woods, aware of how lucky the ordinary day is. He drew a line under it: he does not hear Mother Nature’s Song and decide he has to hug a tree. Squire had already said he wanted the album to mix melancholy with ruder songs, so the set would not be one mood from start to finish. The closer is where the quieter half of that plan sits.
The live band made the same choice. Joey Waronker stayed on drums, Barrie Cadogan played bass, Christian Madden played keys, and Squire’s guitar carried the melody while Gallagher stood still and sang. It is the song on the record that does not ask for a shout-along, which is why it reads clearly when the rest of the album is stomping.
On the road it stayed in the show. At the Civic Hall in Wolverhampton on 14 March 2024, the second joint date after Glasgow Barrowland, Mother Nature’s Song came in ninth, after Mars To Liverpool and before Raise Your Hands. The encore was a cover of the Rolling Stones’ Jumpin’ Jack Flash. A phone video from that night went up on YouTube the next morning. On the record it is the last four minutes. Live, it is the pause before the room gets loud again.
