Track #9: Burning a Horse

This is a song taken from a poem by Henry Taylor [here's more on the poem].  It appears in the book, ‘An Afternoon of Pocket Billiards‘.  That poem, by the way, is one of my favorites of Taylor’s.  Elegantly constructed and made of the stuff that I think about a lot.  Which is to say the random patterns of our lives and how they weave together and how we might pass the time with each other.

This song came out very quickly and pretty much all at once.  I put the capo on the first fret and started strumming and the first words came to me, “All this death and destruction” and I began to think about snakes and ladders and opposites and how you might pick your way through a battlefield littered with carnage and detritus and cling to something like love or a belief and the firmament and the stars are hovered and chilly in the cold steel sky above, etc.

The song is about falsehoods and truth and artifice and reality and finding, as I’ve been writing about, real human connections with people and, of course, what I mean to say, is that it’s about love.  And I believe in the good things and the bad things both.

This song was a newer song that I wrote while we already finalizing the track listing and about to start recording the record and I presented it to Paul with a few others when I wasn’t sure how he’d feel about it and he liked it which is more than I can say for a few other tunes including one called “You Were Right”.  So that was a good thing.

Like I said, it’s a very simple tune.  A verse and a chorus.  Mix and match.  That’s about it.

There was some magic though in the studio that I remember very vividly.  I remember that we were still getting used to the song and we ran it through and the band abruptly ended at the end of the second chorus when there’s a final third verse that is the best verse in the song and things fell away and I was in the control booth and I was going to get annoyed and I started to interject but the band kept playing and held the beat and Matt laid out one of his heartbreaking piano licks and I realized that this accident had turned into this moment of special stark bare beauty and became one of the critical and beautiful moments of the record.

The last verse was something I rather liked and will always hold a special place in my heart and conjure up some images regardless of whatever happens in my life.  It goes like this:

You are everything always
You are handwritten notes on the door
You are early on Fridays
You are fires in winters of war

I guess the song is also about happiness through comfort and domesticity and it’s also about peace and quiet and respite.  I used to leave work a little early on Fridays to get home for movie night and it’s the idea that there are all these things out there are that are synthetic.  There’s that line about silicone and alcohol and basically running around clubs and things like that and drinking and flirting with stupid people with no brains and about how the comforts of home trump all of that.  The comforts of someone you love.  That last line is is that image I alluded to earlier.

The battlefield in winter.  Soldiers huddled around small little red ember glows of warmth and those glows representing something loving and nurturing in the midst of some difficult circumstances and, of course, you can see it in your own mind’s eye as well, can’t you?  The flickering snowflakes and the wind tossing them up into the air like dandelions and, because we’re in Middle Earth, it’s people in animal hides and skins and Viggo Mortensen is somewhere around looking rugged.

But the point is that love is a thing that gives us warmth and there is an impermance to life but there are things we can hold onto and that may serve as driftwood.

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