Tag Archives: When Baby Can’t Go On

Scared of livin’, tired of dyin’

When Baby Can't Go On

The little house was boarded up.

He wasn’t sure what he’d expected to see. It was summer now and hotter than you’d expect but it had been the end of winter then. Spring had been so close. You couldn’t feel it. But you could see it on the calendar.

A week before it happened, he’d been out to see her.

When Baby Can’t Go On

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previous versions
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Wednesday, February 22, 2006

They sat in her little parlor.

An antique painting of a frozen lake hung over a low fire in a stone fireplace, but her gaze was on the icey lake twenty or thirty yards beyond the unfogged glass of the parlor window.

Neither of them said anything for a half hour. He looked in her eyes for a few seconds. It seemed like the first time in the whole visit. He hugged her tentatively as he got up to leave, feeling uncomfortable yet really wanting to hang on to her, try to pull her into the room with him. But he let her go with what he meant to be a jaunty sort of wave and she smiled a little and, for just a moment, really a tiny sliver of time, her blue eyes came alive and he knew they were there, together, maybe just for that instant.

She walked out onto the porch with him. The air was cold and wet, the sky an undifferentiated gray. She smiled again, but her gaze was over his shoulder.

Thinking about how they’d walked, drunkenly, one clear mid-winter night years before onto the ice, he’d said, “Looks like spring is right around the corner. Don’t you be going out for a walk on that ice. I don’t want to get some telegram when I get back to the city.”

Now, in the summer, he stood on the porch. The only thing that could possibly be bluer than the lake was the sky. Scrub birds chirped busily in the brush and a woodpecker hammered at a distant tree.

He stood, looking out across the lake for a very long time.

This version of this song’s a bit shaky, even by AYoS standards (I have a preset macro for pasting the phrase even by AYoS standards into my blog entries, by the way) but it reflects the restless evolution of this song as it struggles toward self-actualization.

previous versions
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Wednesday, February 22, 2006

lyrics
When Baby Can’t Go On

When Baby can’t go on
she wont wonder why
you open up the bottle
and go home when its dry
when the darkeness hits the dawn
and the ocean meets the sky
there’s never in her “always”
and forever in her “goodbye”

baby lived forever
for almost thirty years
then she sailed away one day
on a ship of frozen tears

baby had a house those days
way up the shore
we all knew that she was hiding
but we never knew what for

baby lived forever…

the last time i saw her
i knew it was her time
there was sadness in her laughter
and a long-way-off in her eyes

baby lived forever
for almost thirty years
then she sailed away one day
on a ship of frozen tears

1998-08-06
(C)2008, TK Major

A ship made of frozen tears: When Baby Can’t Go On

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When Baby Can't Go On

Y‘know, I still remember one night real late, a single dog barking way off and Baby lying in bed next to me looking at the roof of the trailer and she takes a drag on her smoke and says: “In the post-literate culture, where cliche and aphorism take on the social importance of fable and where scandal takes on the importance of myth… the truly realized and fully actualized individual must, of necessity, be the architect of the deconstruction of her own mythos and ultimately of her own self-immolation…”

She’s quiet for a long little while while she takes another drag off the cigarette and then she says: “On some kind of level, anyway.”

When Baby Can’t Go On

When Baby can’t go on
she won’t wonder why
you open up the bottle
and go home when it’s dry
when the darkeness hits the dawn
and the ocean meets the sky
there was never in her always
and forever in her goodbye

baby lived forever
for almost thirty years
then she sailed away one day
on a ship made of frozen tears

baby had a house those days
way up the shore
we all knew that she was hiding
but no one knew what for

the last time i saw her
i knew it was her time
there was sadness in her laughter
and a long-way-off in her eyes

baby lived forever
for almost thirty years
then she sailed away one day
on a ship made of frozen tears

When Baby Can’t Go On

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When Baby Can't Go On

Like Connan Doyle killing off Sherlock Holmes, I decided in 1998 that it was time to write my most famous character out of future episodes…

Maybe my heart wasn’t in killing off Baby, the self-destructive, half-woman, half-goddess who tormented the wounded, emotionally tortured protagonists of more than a handful of my songs. At any rate, I found myself writing this pretty much by brainpower alone — and I’m afraid it shows.

Like the half-hearted series finale wrap-up of a canceled TV series, this song shows the wrenchmarks of uninspired, but dogged craftsmanship (y’ listinening, David Lynch?)

Still, I thought it was appropriate as a wrap up for those previous (and thoroughly inspired) Baby songs here in the last few days of Phase One of AYoS. (Phase One, for the unitiated, is the roughly first third of A Year of songs wherein I set out to do every [presentable] song in my songbook, one after another [although in no special order]. Henceforth, my song choices will be guided by whim, inspiration, and the fierce whispering of my legion of demons, guardian angels, and muses.)

Careful readers — or those familiar with popular serial literature and media — will note that, while Baby appears to have made her final voyage into the sunset… we really can’t be sure… perhaps she will show up in some future song, resurrected by sheer force of personality like the indestructible villain of an old Saturday afternoon serial.