storm | A Year of Songs

The view from the hayloft door

First published: TUESDAY, AUGUST 15, 2006

I just started to cry...

There’s a doomed beauty in knowing you’re about to make what you’ll probably look back on as the mistake of your life. Everything seems more real, more vivid, more 3D.

You look around as though it’s the last time you’re ever going to see familiar surroundings… and in a way, you’re right. Nothing will ever be the same, again.

And you know you have to do it, anyway.

I wrote this song as a kind of bluegrass thing but I turned it on its head, here, into a kind of swamp folk rock indulgence that I think exposes some other facets of the song, highlighting the youthful passion and lust for life and love. Which is not, actually, what I was thinking when I came up with the music for this version.

Instead, I’d been so annoyed with an attempt to do this song the previous night in a sensitive, finger-picked style that I decided, really, to just invert the style and approach. (The George Castanza Strategy. If everything you do turns out wrong, do the opposite.)

Internet Archive page for this recording
previous AYoS version

I Just Started to Cry

We ran through the summer night
it was hot and it was black
we ran until we were all alone
and didn’t even know the way back

We were young
we were in love
that summer we were one
when I look back I start to cry
to think of what is gone

A storm came up from the south real fast
and lightning lit the rain
I looked in her eyes for a moment
and then it was dark again

Our hands entwined and then our tongues
we were soaking wet
we made our way to the old Hansen barn
and there our souls met

I woke up the next morning
and she slept by my side
the sunlight poured through the hayloft door
and I just started to cry

I cried cause she looked so pretty lying there
I cried because I loved her so
I cried cause I knew she was the only one
and I cried cause I knew I was gonna go

Looking for Trouble

It was a stormy afternoon on the rain spattered patio of a rundown little motel north of Ensenada in 1981. The ocean raged against the rocks just beyond the edge of the unpainted concrete patio.

I’d pulled a plain wooden chair out of the room onto the slab and I sat there, a six pack of Bohemia or maybe Negra Modelo in a sack next to the chair and a bottle of Sauza Extra next to it.

Sea spray mixed with rain coated me and my guitar — a $20 special I’d picked up on an earlier trip — but how often do you get to write songs with the ocean crashing literally at your feet and the sky roiling like a time lapse movie. I wrote three songs that afternoon. Two of them were pretty good, as my songs go. I had just broken up with a girl I’d gone with for nearly 3 years, so I had a lot of songrwiting energy, I guess.

Anyhow, though I wrote it a quarter century ago, there’s never really been a proper recording. I decided to do something about that, but these things are never a direct path from point a to point b for me. This rough demo is sort of a snapshot along the way. What do I like in it? The snare brush. I think that’s pretty cool. That’s about the only thing I’d come close to keeping, at this point.