Tag Archives: Carrot

Finishing the puzzle…

Carrot

It’s a truism oft-cited by motivational speakers and their ilk that walking is the process of falling forward with our weight on one foot and then suddenly shifting the other foot forward to catch ourselves… over and over. This is, of course, intended to show that there is no progress without risk, no movement without somehow defying gravity, if only momentarily.

Whatever.

At a certain point you get somewhere, even if the somewhere is right back around where you started from… but you’re wiser for the journey. Yeah… sure. Wiser and back on square one… having passed Go, having spent the 200 dollars you collected and maybe some rent from that place on Park Avenue you lucked into and then lost to the bank.

I wrote this song before I’d passed Go the first of many times… but I could see the shape of things and I kept looking for an out. The fairy tale option, maybe. The magic piece that would make the puzzle something you could hang on the wall and then somehow enjoy in contented satisfaction. There were some that almost looked like they might fit… but in the end, the jigsaw puzzle ended up scattered…

I knew it would never end up looking like the picture on the box…

Carrot

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Monday, November 28, 2005
Thursday, May 31, 2007

lyrics
Carrot

In the course of events
I’ve seen my goals hanging just like a carrot in front of my nose
In the struggle for those higher attainments, hell,
I’ve been to the top
and I’ve seen the drop on the other side

And I don’t care if your money’s no good
I don’t care if both your legs are wood
I don’t care what your ma says to do
Just come away with me

It takes time to get where you want to go
and its never quite the same when you get there
but that doesn’t stop me cause there’s still a couple things
I’d like to try with you and you never can tell
it might work out all right

You can sit and talk about life all day
as much as you can talk your questions wont go away
it’s a conversation that leads me to say
just come away with me

I’ve been burned before
and I’ll get burned again
I guess that’s the same for everyone
I know what I need
I know what I want
I know what I get —
they don’t always correspond

You can sit and talk about life all day
as much as you can talk your questions wont go away
it’s a conversation that leads me to say
just come away with me

(C)1974,2007, TK Major

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Come away with me…

Carrot

Kan Zhonggan thought of himself as an anti-Communist patriot, training to fight against the oppressive government on the Chinese mainland.

But he fell in love.

His story is told in today’s Los Angeles Times by Times staff writer, Ching-Ching Ni:

THE happiest time of his life lasted four days.

It was the winter of 1958. He had just run away with his lover to Shanghai. They went sightseeing every day and didn’t mind the dark streets or meagerly stocked stores where coupons were used to ration food. Life was just beginning.

Until two plainclothes policemen walked up behind them one day and called out his name.

“Are you Kan Zhonggan?”

Blinded by happiness and love, he said yes.

“Take a walk with us.”

Around the corner, a car was waiting. The couple got in. One officer sat between them. They drove for half an hour and then his lover was told to get out. As she was dragged away, their eyes met.

They didn’t see each other again for 27 years.

More…

Carrot

more stream & DL options

previous versions
Monday, November 28, 2005

lyrics
Carrot

In the course of events
I’ve seen my goals hanging just like a carrot in front of my nose
In the struggle for those higher attainments, hell,
I’ve been to the top
and I’ve seen the drop on the other side

And I don’t care if your money’s no good
I don’t care if both your legs are wood
I don’t care what your ma says to do
Just come away with me

It takes time to get where you want to go
and its never quite the same when you get there
but that doesn’t stop me cause there’s still a couple things
I’d like to try with you and you never can tell
it might work out all right

You can sit and talk about life all day
as much as you can talk your questions wont go away
it’s a conversation that leads me to say
just come away with me

I’ve been burned before
and I’ll get burned again
I guess that’s the same for everyone
I know what I need
I know what I want
I know what I get —
they don’t always correspond

You can sit and talk about life all day
as much as you can talk your questions wont go away
it’s a conversation that leads me to say
just come away with me

(C)1974, TK Major
(C)2007, TK Major

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Carrot

Carrot

There was a time, in that lost era of my early manhood, when I judged life to be essentially a balancing act between work (writing and music) and love — or, more properly, romance.

In an earlier post, I wrote about the beautiful Icelandic girl who was, briefly, a muse, mentor, and colleague in the painfully difficult reinvention of myself from poet to songwriter. (Far more painful, without doubt, for those around me.)

This song was the first of my early songs to win largely favorable comment from my friend and it was the first time I ever felt what I’d later realize was a form of professional pride (which does, indeed, I would later learn, often go before a nasty, if occasionally comic, pratfall).

To be frank… it was probably one of the first of my songs to have recognizably repeating sections and some sort of coherent structure. My earliest work leaned hard toward the fever-dream stream-of-nonsense school — with literary, metaphysical, and scriptural references thrown in to spice up the already indigestible gumbo.

In fact, this song refers to that phase in my life (talking to girls all night and playing long rambling songs til dawn… it was a phase I had a hard time growing past). My artistic ambivalence and deep-seated alienation may have seemed like shtick — sometimes they even did to me — but in the long run it became obvious that they were all too real and, at the risk of being overly self-revelatory, I think it’s safe to say that that reality permeates my creative work.

Ya think?


Carrot

(In the Course of Events)

In the course of events
I’ve seen my goals hanging just like a carrot in front of my nose
In the struggle for those higher attainments, hell,
I’ve been to the top
and I’ve seen the drop on the other side

And I don’t care if your money’s no good
I don’t care if both your legs are wood
I don’t care what your ma says to do
Just come away with me

It takes time to get where you want to go
and its never quite the same when you get there
but that doesn’t stop me cause there’s still a couple things
I’d like to try with you and you never can tell
it might work out all right

You can sit and talk about life all day
as much as you can talk your questions wont go away
it’s a conversation that leads me to say
just come away with me

I’ve been burned before
and I’ll get burned again
I guess that’s the same for everyone
I know what I need
I know what I want
I know what I get —
they don’t always correspond

You can sit and talk about life all day
as much as you can talk your questions wont go away
it’s a conversation that leads me to say
just come away with me

(C)1974 TK Major

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