I Am Pegasus Lyrics

It was an accidental hit that Ross was embarrassed by until recent times. Ryan originally had two songs in mind. “One was about the fact that I had just discovered that Ross means horse; I’d looked it up in a baby book, and I thought that was really funny, so I had the line ‘My name means horse.’ And also at the time I was having a really disastrous attempt at a relationship with an air hostess. It didn’t work out, so I was writing a song about that, and ‘I am flying but let me down’ meant I want out of the relationship. Which was not quite true, because she was more interested in getting out of the relationship than I was. The guy she was going out with was Jeffrey, so that’s where the Jeffrey in the song comes from, it says, ‘I am Michael, I am Jeffrey and John.’ Michael was the boyfriend of my high school sweetheart, Christine, and I think I became a songwriter because of her.” The process took around two months. “I was writing two songs and getting nowhere with them, so I combined them and got a flying horse. And I came up with Pegasus, I liked the sound of it, so I thought, okay, that’s cool, ‘I am Pegasus, my name means horse’! Then I’d read somewhere that John Lennon used a rhyming dictionary, so I ordered one from England, and I looked up all the things that rhymed with Pegasus and I got Dimitrius and Sagittarius. And of course the Sagittarian’s the half-man half-horse.” Ryan’s producer at the time, Peter Dawkins, heard the finished song and said it was the obvious single. “But it wasn’t really a song that I related to. I saw it more as a bit of a songwriting exercise, a bit of a throwaway.” While the song has never been covered – after all, he says, you’d have to be called Ross to want to sing it – "I Am Pegasus" is etched in the minds of many Australians and emerged on various compilation albums. “I even found it on an album with ‘American Pie’. I thought that was kind of cool. Because ‘American Pie’ was the song, and I was thinking when I first started recording, I need an ‘American Pie’! A song that would capture people’s imaginations.” Until ten years ago, the song embarrassed Ryan. “I used to quite arrogantly purposely change it in live gigs, take the piss out of the song completely, because I was uncomfortable with it. But at the same time I’d missed the point that it was really an insult to people who like it. They were there to see it and I should have been flattered that they liked it in the first place.”