I Called Your Name

As I wrote in January of 2006, when this song first appeared in A Year of Songs, it’s the third song I wrote — and considered a real song, as opposed to one of the several score of pretty awful early attempts. What can I say — I grew up writing free verse… no rhyme, no meter… lots of self-indulgence. It takes a while to get into the very different discipline of songwriting. Or it did for me.

Anyway, this tune’s maybe a little long on portentuous vagueness — though I was clearly shooting for evocative mystery.

But, believe it or not, it’s all more or less grounded in actual events. Where the song says, a man said you were the queen… well, that’s exactly what someone said about the young woman the song addresses. To this day, I really don’t know what he meant.

And that blinding, shining, white light? Well… someone stole it.

I Called Your Name

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Saturday, January 21, 2006

lyrics
I Called Your Name

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, 2007, TK Major

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

[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.]