Never Give In was written a few days after that first recording session in Damascus. I always felt like it was the antidote to the saccharine of “Radio.” And they belonged on the same album—that album named “Courage” which never completely manifested. Even though it had a strong melodic concept and a classically 80s arrangement, it never found its way into any of Soul Parish’ later projects because it was too square.

On the one hand, it was deeply moralizing in not very-well thought out poetry (which I decided against rewriting for this recording). It wasn’t a tone I was comfortable with at the time. It wasn’t what Soul Parish was about. I knew what I wanted in songs, and in music generally, was “another world.” This is an ideal I’ve continued to pursue as a chamber music composer. Never Give In is squarely about “this world” and at the time, “this world” was the Reagan/Thatcher era. There was no shortage of political comment in song about that. Never Give In also reveals a political cynicism that, again, I have revealed to very few, and certainly not to anyone by way of music. I was a conscientious objector and a passivist (are those mutually exclusive?) but I was also clear in my mistrust of politics and the government. In that respect, the lyrics are deeply sincere…”don’t turn your back, they’ll push you to the wall.” There’s some autobiography in here too. I was considered unemployable, owing to my “artistic nature” and my family urged me to join the US military. I staunchly refused, but by stroke of horrific irony that same winter I was recording these first Soul Parish songs, I was conscripted for the Syrian army reserve. It took several months of wading through red tape by my beloved uncle to get me free of the situation. I never actually served, but my paperwork was going through the pipeline and there was a day I stood in line to have my head shaved on my way to Syrian bootcamp. This was my daily life for several months, while nights I wrote songs.

It’s no wonder Never Give In appeared, it’s also no wonder I didn’t want to live in that world musically: it was too horrific in the day, and my nights writing club songs were about life in the club, which is a life out of time, out of daylight. It’s the space where songs like “With Me” weren’t funny dramas, but real conversations between real people. That was the life I wanted to talk about.

I had all but forgotten about Never Give In until this last minute when I withheld this recording from release: it occurred to me that, in spite of everything, Never Give In is important in the Soul Parish portfolio because it shows I was able to create with stylistic breadth. Good or bad, radio-ready or not, Never Give In is the kind of song that got tacked on to the end of films during the credits. It was the kind of song I needed to have in my back pocket for potential commercial opportunities.

The first instrumental recording of Never Give In, possibly with a vocal overdub that, as I recall, is slightly out of sync with the backing track, exists on a 1/4 reel-to-reel tape in storage, along with all the rest of the Soul Parish tech. That tech includes a hundred or so data tapes, probably another one hundred or so cassettes of song ideas, rough starts, improvisations etc., notebooks with lyrics, and pages and pages of production notes - EQ’s, fade cues, edit cues, and probably a book-size collection of templates for original synth sounds.