{"id":74,"date":"2005-11-29T05:46:00","date_gmt":"2005-11-29T05:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ayearofsongs.org\/blg\/?p=74"},"modified":"2015-11-01T17:20:34","modified_gmt":"2015-11-02T01:20:34","slug":"carrot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ayearofsongs.org\/blg\/2005\/11\/29\/carrot\/","title":{"rendered":"Carrot"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Carrot\"<\/p>\n

T<\/span>here was a time, in that lost era of my early manhood, when I judged life to be essentially a balancing act between work <\/span>(writing and music) and love — or, more properly, romance.<\/p>\n

In an earlier post<\/a>, I wrote about the beautiful Icelandic girl who was, briefly, a muse, mentor, and colleague in the painfully difficult reinvention of myself from poet to songwriter. (Far more painful, without doubt, for those around me.)<\/p>\n

This song was the first of my early songs to win largely favorable comment from my friend and it was the first time I ever felt what I’d later realize was a form of professional pride (which does, indeed, I would later learn, often go before a nasty, if occasionally comic, pratfall).<\/p>\n

To be frank… it was probably one of the first of my songs to have recognizably repeating sections and some sort of coherent structure. My earliest work leaned hard toward the fever-dream stream-of-nonsense school — with literary, metaphysical, and scriptural references thrown in to spice up the already indigestible gumbo.<\/p>\n

In fact, this song refers to that phase in my life (talking to girls all night and playing long rambling songs til dawn… it was a phase I had a hard time growing past). My artistic ambivalence and deep-seated alienation may have seemed like shtick — sometimes they even did to me — but in the long run it became obvious that they were all too real and, at the risk of being overly self-revelatory, I think it’s safe to say that that reality permeates my creative work.<\/p>\n

Ya think?<\/p>\n\nhttp:\/\/www.archive.org\/download\/In_the_Course_of_Events\/AYoS20051128_In_the_Course_of_Events.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n


\nCarrot<\/span><\/p>\n

(In the Course of Events)<\/p>\n

In the course of events
\nI’ve seen my goals hanging just like a carrot in front of my nose
\nIn the struggle for those higher attainments, hell,
\nI’ve been to the top
\nand I’ve seen the drop on the other side<\/p>\n

And I don’t care if your money’s no good<\/span>
\nI don’t care if both your legs are wood<\/span>
\nI don’t care what your ma says to do <\/span>
\nJust come away with me<\/span><\/p>\n

It takes time to get where you want to go
\nand its never quite the same when you get there
\nbut that doesn’t stop me cause there’s still a couple things
\nI’d like to try with you and you never can tell
\nit might work out all right<\/p>\n

You can sit and talk about life all day<\/span>
\nas much as you can talk your questions wont go away<\/span>
\nit’s a conversation that leads me to say<\/span>
\njust come away with me<\/span><\/p>\n

I’ve been burned before
\nand I’ll get burned again
\nI guess that’s the same for everyone
\nI know what I need
\nI know what I want
\nI know what I get —
\nthey don’t always correspond<\/p>\n

You can sit and talk about life all day<\/span>
\nas much as you can talk your questions wont go away<\/span>
\nit’s a conversation that leads me to say<\/span>
\njust come away with me<\/span><\/p>\n

(C)1974 TK Major
\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There was a time, in that lost era of my early manhood, when I judged life to be essentially a balancing act between work (writing and music) and love — or, more properly, romance. In an earlier post, I wrote about the beautiful Icelandic girl who was, briefly, a muse, mentor, and colleague in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pgc_meta":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,340],"tags":[423,746,911],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ayearofsongs.org\/blg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ayearofsongs.org\/blg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ayearofsongs.org\/blg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ayearofsongs.org\/blg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ayearofsongs.org\/blg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ayearofsongs.org\/blg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2076,"href":"https:\/\/ayearofsongs.org\/blg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions\/2076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ayearofsongs.org\/blg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ayearofsongs.org\/blg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ayearofsongs.org\/blg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}