Go
Or maybe Go If You Want Me – or Go If You Want… Something like that. Dunno yet.
But, for now, it’s just Go. A new tune. A tune with a pick in hand. Not the first pick tune I’ve written recently, but the first recorded.
First, the pick: A month or so ago Chapman Stick player Rob Martino stopped by 909 Saloon to check out Mike Dougherty and I playing some sets. As Rob and I both have a love for the old, acoustic Jethro Tull tunes, I had promised myself the next time he came by I would play one of the few that I can still remember (left over from the years before when I knew most everything Ian Anderson wrote for solo guitar and voice). He stopped in and I played Dun Ringill. A lovely tune and fun to play. So fun, in fact, that I started messing with a pick again. I find it keeps me a little simpler in my playing and a little more focused on the tune and less on the filigree.
As to why it’s the first new pick tune recorded… Well, I have taken to not recording any tunes as soon as I write them. I like setting them out live for a few months and letting them settle, letting the lyrics slowly, and sometimes ridiculously subtly, change, letting the guitar lines and solos solidify, and really deciding if I like the tune enough to bother recording it at all. I have several new tunes wating for me to bother putting them down on tape, or hard disk, or flash card, or whatever. This tune, however, was written, start to finish, with my wife sitting behind me – from the point I put the tune down on tape with a mumbled half English, half gibberish lyric over the melody to the last word down on paper, she was sort of following along. Normally I’m much more monastic in my writing than this. I’ve even thought of building a writing shack down the hill at the edge of the Croft’s land (an oil lamp, a cast iron stove, a tin roof, you know the drill – basically a chicken coop with less frills). But this time she was there for all of it. So she has kind of claimed it. And she wanted a recording. Oddly, this also means that, do to her interest in the process, I have thought a lot more about how this song happened and the were’s and why’s of the story than just about any song I have ever written. I shall spare you that mess, however.
It is a tune that encompasses one of my most prominent themes: restlessness in and escaping from (or being trapped in) a small, mid-western town… I can’t imagine where that comes from.
I’ve already changed a few words since I recorded it yesterday, as the observant shall notice.
It is up at reverbnation as an exclusive download.
It’s been some years since I recorded anything as dynamic as picking a dreadnought can be so the recording is a little rough, a little clipped. Sorry about that. Consider it a bootleg.
The lyrics:
Go
Down on the field
It’s fourteen to three and the lights look surreal
Dozens of shadows stalk each back on the line
Last year flew by
Now you’re looking to leave and give Indy a try
A small streets girl dreamt of wide streets all of her life.
If I run home
Get in the car and just leave you alone
A tear in my eye and my back to the stadium lights
It’s not the way
It’s not like you’d cry or you’d beg me to stay
Thank you so much for a typical Saturday night.
An old Ford Ranger
Twisting down a winding road
Chasing silence
Don’t make a sound, don’t let me know
I’ll be here for the night
And I’ll go
I’ll go if you want me to go if you want me to go.
So why be right
A Formica top table and red stained bar light
A cup of sweet coffee and you’re blowing smoke from your tea
I hoped you’d ask
Over that burger you’d drop your damn mask
“O won’t you come with me, bust out of this town and be free?”
Chorus
I’ll be here
The second best thing in your runner up year
Let me roll down this damn window and get me some air
The river flows
Let’s follow the Wabash and see where it goes
If only you’d ask me I’m sure I could manage, I swear…
Chorus
So what’s it worth?
A babe at our feet and fire in our hearth
I’ll go if you want me to go if you want me to go.
PS.: If a fit of nostalgia of how I used to work, I recorded a full band version of this tune. It is, however, not likely to ever see the light of day…
