Eucalyptus trees | A Year of Songs

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As promised, here’s the song I wrote immediately before yesterday’s “She’d Be Mine” — telling much the same story from a somewhat different perspective — and in a significantly different style.

Although this was originally written as a country/roots oriented song, as well, it seemed to drift inexorably toward a funky stripped down reading, as can be seen in the ‘studio version‘ below.

(I’m not really sure how to make the distinction between the fully produced versions that already exist for some AYoS songs and these, highly informal — okay, slapdash — acoustic versions. The ‘studio versions’ were also recorded at home on my own gear. My studio at my old house was my office. Here in my tiny beachside flat, my studio — and my office — is my dining room table. Hell, it’s the dining room table, too.)

Just below is the little story/blurb I sometimes used to promote this song in the “good ol’ days” at the old mp3.com (where the ‘studio version’ garnered many thousands of plays over the several years that indie music paradise was open for biz).

You’ll note that it’s more or less a prose retelling of yesterday’s “She’d Be Mine”:

That last time he saw her will always stick in his mind. She was getting out of a white Volvo, a toddler nearby and a baby in a stroller. The wind and the sun caught her hair and it drifted in slow motion. For an instant the last eight years were a dream.

He hadn’t seen her since just after her wedding. He’d been invited, she even called, but he didn’t go. He told himself it was just an accident he was playing guitar in the park across from the church as she and her new husband ran out to the limo in a hail of rice. The sun caught her hair, then, too.

He could smell the Eucalyptus trees at the edge of the parking lot and for a second he was aware of his own cigarettes and whiskey, dirty denim smell. He shifted back a little into the shadow of the awning and tipped his head into the big paper cup of acrid chainstore espresso — but she might as well have been in another universe. He guessed that, really, she was.

Sometimes