Tag Archives: longing

A thousand girls have told me so…

California eucalyptus

They used to call me the bard of bitterness, denial, and regret. Well… it was kind of a one-liner I made up to put on my show flyers. But… you know.

I think I mentioned sometime last year that a girl I’d once dated, early in our relationship, asked me to sing her a love song. “I don’t mean you have to sing it to me,” she said. “That would seem a bit presumptious, I think.” College girls…

“Just sing me something romantic and I’ll pretend it’s about me.” And she laughed.

I had my songbooks right there — I’m almost completely incapable of performing any of my songs from memory (crazy as that might seem considering most of them have no more than 3 or 4 chords spread over 3 or 4 quatrains) — so I started flipping through them, giving one line descriptions of each song as I flipped by…

“Drug overdose song. Betrayal song. Threw-it-all-away song. Another betrayal song. Fare-thee-well-and-flog-off song. Another threw-it-all-away song…

“Ah, here it is, my love song: ‘I Must Be F—— Nuts.’ I knew I had one.”

(It’s a good one but I’ve yet to figure out how to do it justice in this blog. It’s… well… it’s a bit vulgar. But it is a love song.)

Anyhow, those who’ve been following this blog will probably have already guessed that there were a lot of threw-it-all-away songs in those books. It’s like, oh, you know, a recurring theme, I guess. Though anyone with access to a DSM might come up with a less charitable characterization.

I’m not really sure why I like this one so much… except maybe that I crack myself up every time I sing the line quoted in the title of this post. I’m certainly not the libertine the line would suggest but there’s still some kind of poetic truth there, nonetheless.

Internet Archive page for this recording

AYoS version 19 November 2005
AYoS version 2 March 2006

She’d Be Mine

Last time I saw her a couple years ago
she was shovin a couple of kids in a white volvo
the sun came down through the eucalyptus trees
it made her hair just glow like it always used to be

just then I wish I could have said the words
that I could never say
cause if I’d told her baby I’ll be yours
she’d be mine today

the pool house the beach house the boat house by the lake
I’ll be damned if I can remember a thing
yet everytime I think about holding hands in school
my heart just pounds like it always used to do

right now I wish I could have said the words…

sometimes when I sleep I call her name
a thousand girls have told me so
I thre it all awaly and now I want it back
and I know it can never be so
[I know it can never be so]

and right now I wish I could have said the words
that I could never say
cause if I’d told her baby I’ll be yours
she’d be mine today

(C)1998 TK Major
October

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I didn’t know I could still be scared (Valentine’s Day)

XXXXX

A clumsy, rushed, homemade card and a bouquet of flowers plucked between my car and the current GF’s door and presented with the aw shucks charm of a little boy cozying up to someone he thought might give him a toy later if maybe he was charming enough.

That’s why I live alone with my cat. Yep.

And, you know, I’m so far down that road that I’m okay with that. Mostly.

But every now and then I feel something stir — and it scares me.

It’s not loneliness. I’m absurdly content. Self-contained. Hermetic.

But sometimes, when someone catches me a little off guard, sometimes, I feel myself on that slippery slope that leads to the abyss…


Happy Valentine’s Day, suckers!

[For additional insight into my Valentine’s Day sensibilities, flip back a few days to Forget About the Moon.]

previous AYoS version

Scared

dont know what to do about you
I did’nt know that I could still be scared
empty dreams night after night
afraid that you’ll never be there

I could give myself to love
but love would only break my heart
i could give my world to you
but you would tear that little world apart

one day I looked at myself
and then I began again
I built it up and I tore it down
and I won’t do that again

I could give myself to love…

everytime I hear I’m doing all right
I know that I’m living a lie
everytime that I feel myself start to slip
I hold my hand to the fire

I could give myself to love
but love would only break my heart
i could give my world to you
but you would tear that little world apart

(C)1994, TK Major

Blog within a blog: It strikes us as surprisingly odd (we’re so stunned we’re back using the editorial “we”) but we just realized that three of the four songs featured on the [then-current] front page of www.Ourmedia.org (which is was our portal for posting our audio material to www.archive.org) are, well, we’re almost too modest to say… but, OK, you dragged it out of us: they’re TK Major songs. From A Year of Songs. We’re amazed and pleased and we hope it doesn’t get the Editor of the Week (who we don’t know, we swear) fired before his week is up.

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I Called Your Name

I Called Your Name

The sun poked down through tall pines in a mountain canyon in early fall a long, long time ago.

The air was cool but the sun was warm on his shoulders and back as he squatted on a rock above the little creek watching insects skitter across the surface and small, silvery fish darting in and out of the shadows. A big crawdad waved its arms a bit and crawled under some rocks.

She was a little farther up the creek, her long, freckled legs draped across a sunny rock, her even-more freckled face turned, eyes closed, to the sun.

They’d talked for hours, for days, for years, for centuries, until their thoughts seemed so synchronized that speaking out loud seemed unnecessary. He could close his own eyes and feel the sun on her face as though it was his own, the rock underneath her.

But something was missing.

Some part of him that had always been there was now gone. He couldn’t find it… even though he wasn’t sure quite what it was. But it was gone. He knew that.

As the day began to fade and the canyon chill set in he began making the fire as birds darted from tree to tree or sang their evening songs.

Later they sat wordlessly staring into the fire. He glanced at her face in the flickering light… her face that was so familiar, her face that he’d traced with his fingertips and kissed a thousand times was a mysterious shroud… he could feel her thoughts like a distant storm… but all he knew was… she was going.

I Called Your Name

y’know I called your name
when I was afraid
but you were upstate
and you didn’t come
though I thought you might

there was a time when I’d play any game
just to be alive
there was a time
long enough to wait
time enough to wait
time enough to bring it back
and stash it away

a man thought you were the queen
did not mean a thing
but I thought it did
and if you were the queen
I wondered
and I wondered
how you kept it hid
and how did you steal
that shining light
how did you steal that blinding light
how did you steal that shining light from me
how did you steal that pure white light from me

(C)1972, TK Major

[This is, more or less, the third real song I ever wrote. The second (which won’t be appearing here unless I make an archaelogical dig into the darkest reaches of my garage) was a bit of an epic involving spiritual paralysis, crafted around a central metaphor of the carved ebony icons I saw being sold under the elevated railway near the Gare du Nord in Paris in 1971. I don’t even remember what the first one was about.]

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Head Full of Crazy, Heart Full of Fire

Head Full of Crazy, Heart Full of Fire

 

Just about every time I ever sang this song in front of people I know, someone has laughed out loud at the line, “I work all day and I sweat in the sun”…

Fair enough. The song is certainly not autobiographical.

And there’s certainly more than a little whimsy.

But, you know… there’s just a little bit of truth in it. Maybe it does take a real man to tell his girl no.

Heh.

[Warning: there are some technical difficulties with this recording… but the performance was so breathtaking… no, that’s a lie. It’s a typical slapdash performance. It was just that the clock was ticking and I needed to get this up and get on with life.]

Head Full of Crazy, Heart Full of Fire

When I see you
and I look in your eyes
I get a head full of crazy
and a heart full of fire
but I cant talk about it
and I cant act on it
and I couldnt really stop it
even if I wanted
I’m tellin you so that you understand
that’s what it’s like to be a man

I work all day and
I sweat in the sun
I’ll work all by life
and I’ll die when it’s done
but if I had you
to sleep by my side
if I had you
to be my bride
if I had you
I’d be glad to be a man

Now I know that you
would really like to stay
but I have responsiblities
that must come into play
I must think of what’s right
— what’s right for you
When his girl loses her head
— a man’s gotta think for two
but that’s what it’s like
that’s what its like to be a man

(C)1990, TK Major

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