Ric Neale: 'I didn’t start off thinking "I will now write about grief", it’s not a how-to guide'

But his new album, Parting Ways, is a deeply personal record written after the loss of his best friend, Lee, in 2019. “One of the things I became aware of in all my conversations with friends who’d been through grief was, it sounds like a cliche, but it is a process,” says the 48-year-old, from Wakefield. “People talk about the seven stages of grief but everyone I spoke to said it’s so blurred as to be irrelevant, so I always knew that I was going to feel differently on day 10 to I did on day one. I didn’t start off thinking ‘I will now write about grief’, it’s not a how-to guide, it’s very much I felt inspired in this way.

“The record started out being very specifically about grief and it was ‘I am sad, my friend is gone’ but it very soon developed into a celebration of the fact that I had a friend like that at all. And also, because we were contemporaries, we had been best friends since the age of five, we went to school and university at the same time, we heard Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys on the same day, there were so many paperweights that hold down all the elements of my life that we shared, it was difficult not to make one consider one’s own mortality. Again, that started off as ‘oh no, I’ve not got long’ to ‘wait a minute, time is finite and it needs to be celebrated’.”

During the writing process, Neale worked with Star Bereavement and the Swan Song Project, run by Ben Buddy Slack. “Basically what happens is he pairs up a songwriter, sometimes himself and sometimes somebody else, with somebody who is going through bereavement,” he explains. “For example, I worked with a woman whose father had passed away and she wanted to mark that for herself and so wrote these lyrics with Ben that were to do with images of her father and talked about the songs that she and her father really loved, and then I co-wrote it and it was strangely inspiring. Normally when you’re a musician, you got ‘here’s a very specific idea, who can I broaden this out?’ so people can find a way to have it fit into their lives, but I was weirdly inspired by writing a song that was for one person only.

“There’s a song on the new record called You Would Have Loved This Song. I think I have got old-fashioned tastes and now and again I’ll try to contemporise them; my friend Lee, however, had no such interest in contemporising his tastes, he listened to music as old as the music that I loved. So every time I was writing I was thinking ‘I could do this, I could do that’, but every single time I came to a decision like that, it was instead, ‘Well, what would he have loved?’ So that interaction with Swan Song really defined this album.”

The closing song, Too Much and Not Enough, is about how there a different scenarios that Neale finds himself in which remind him of Lee “too much in that it’s painful, but not enough that I can’t share them with him”.

He says: “The conversation between those two ideas of things being too hard and they’re not hard enough in a weird way has been a really interesting thing that I’ve not experienced before.

“I worked with an organisation called Star Bereavement, who are based in Wakefield and who work with young people who are in grief, it may be for a parent or sibling who has passed away, and as part of the Wakefield Sculpture Trail one of the sculptures that is now up is outside the Wakefield History Centre is defined by grief, it’s about the loss of a child. I went in and said ‘why don’t we write a song about this?’

“Instead of us sharing our incredibly complicated grief stories, it was loads of floating bits of images that we put together into a song that I performed outside the History Centre. It was an amazing thing to find that this process that I’d been though had enabled people to share parts of their grief story in a way that is practically useful rather than it just being ‘I am sad’. It was beautiful images for the purposes of making something worthwhile.”

For several years, Neale has lectured in the craft of songwriting at Leeds Conservatoire. He says when it comes to writing songs of his own he has to “untrain myself so it becomes a bit less head and a bit more heart”. He adds: “There are definitely lots of benefits to it​​​​​​​ because I am constantly inspired by new music that I would not have found otherwise. The music that we hear is often not made for 48-year-olds whereas I hear a lot of great music that way, not to mention their own music which I find incredibly inspiring, it definitely helps with my process in a lot of ways.”

​​​​​​​Having played songs from Parting Ways while it was a work-in-progess ​​​​​​​at his monthly Monochrome nights which he runs​​​​​​​ at Wakefield pub The Jolly Tap, he now hopes to present thea album in its entirety at some point. In the meantime he’s continuing his collaboration with Divina De Campo.

“I wrote and produced a Christmas record for her​​​​​​​ and her last single, which was called Waving Goodbye​​​​​​​, I wrote for her, and since we did this musical Dancing Bear we’ve carried on the contact,” Neale says. “We’re good friends, we are more similar than the outside world might assume, but we both are quite old school in terms of ​​​​​​​music hall and vaudeville and Sondheim, all of that world of ‘there’s a piano player and there’s an incredibly glamorous person and there’s jokes and there’s songs​​​​​​​’.

“We toured the UK last July and had an amazing time, I absolutely loved it. It’s a really good test as a musician working in those kind of scenarios because she starts singing something and I’ve got to play along​​​​​​​, and also the audience interaction often leads from one thing to another​​​​​​​. It’s one of those things where you’re not just there to be a piano player, you’ve got to speak to the audience​​​​​​​, so I love it, it’s a fully rounded performance​​​​​​​.

“Also, to hear songs that I have written be just adored ​​​​​​​by an audience that is so completely different to my usual audience​​​​​​​ is an amazing thing. We plan to carry on working together, there’s talk of a tour next year​​​​​​​.

“It’s a lovely relationship and I get to wear a daft spangly jacket – what piano player doesn’t want that?”

Parting Ways is available on streaming services now and on limited edition CD from ricneale.com