02 | December | 2005 | A Year of Songs

Without Warning
Artistic, romantic types (like us singer-songwriters, yo) often seem to fall in love with goddesses and ghosts. Those conversant in the literature of myth and legend are probably familiar with the deeply troubled relationships that grow when man and immortal become romantically entwined.

I wrote this song in 1974 when I was involved with a goddess — and a ghost. The goddess was a ringer for 30’s screen diva, Carole Lombard, and, by society’s then-outmoded standards, was technically otherwise entangled. But I knew it was me she loved, even though she told me she didn’t have the courage to be free…

For a young man, a young artist, in that position, deeply torn but deeply in love, intoxicated with the heroic tragicness of the situation, there was little recourse, then, but to lose myself in the arduous work of seducing one of my best friends, a pretty, serious-minded strawberry blond with — I firmly believe in retrospect — absolutely no romantic or sexual interest in me — but who, in her own way, lusted for a sort of platonic but passionate friendship and who seemed to show up, unbidden, on my doorstep at the strangest times.

[UPDATE: I just listened to this again… and, my gosh, it’s sloppy — even by the extraordinarily loose standards of AYoS. Mercy.]

WITHOUT WARNING

You came without warning
on a Monday morning
the day was all shot through
by shadows from the past
afterimages of the last
time that I was with you

and it didn’t take nothing
to see that you were something
that I just had to do
Well it mighta been right
on a Monday night
to release a little energy with you
In the end it came down to you

Now I didn’t mean maybe
when I put it to you baby
There’s just time space and nothing more
But instead of pain
we could have pleasure again
just like before you heard about the fall

So when you come come
come come come around me
please take some form
please take some from I can see
Well ghosts are fine
but I like some flesh on mine
you can’t steal my love
you can’t have my love for free
you can’t steal my love
you can’t have my love for free

19 Days

This is not a murder ballad.

It’s a song about a long-haul trucker coming to the realization that his marriage is over. He thinks about it when he drives. He thinks about it when he lies awake in the sleeper in the back of the cab. And he prays about it in a little church on the way home. Simple, hunh?

That’s what I thought.

But I had to stop performing it because people kept coming up afterwards and saying, “Man that’s dark. It’s so seething and brink-of-violence. So, how does he kill her?”

And… as I read the lyrics now, they may be vague but, yeah, depending on how you read them, they could also be a bit ominous. But, really, what I had in mind was a guy simply breaking out of that thrall of indecision… just before you finally give up on someone you were positive would change your world. Not that, you know, I was ever such a sap. But people have been…

Ever think of all the great songs that started with the phrase “wake up”?

Yeah… well, I just checked, and, as of today, four of the songs so far (out of 71 songs since September 22) from A Year of Songs have the words “wake up” in the first 3 words of the song — and one more has “woke up.”

Don’t ask me why. If I had to guess, I’d say I was subconsciously on a quest to come up with a line with the classic elegance of “Woke up this morning / got myself a beer” (Jim Morrison) — which, I’ve always felt, pretty much sez it all.