For week 20 of #songaweek2021 I turned to Rilke for my lyrics. I’d saved this poem with other song ideas I had but I wasn’t clear on its title. An internet search brought me to another WordPress blogger’s post about the same poem, from almost exactly a year ago! The blogger, Jeff Japp, gives two possible interpretations of the poem. And then a commenter asked if it might also be “the-end-of-quarantine poem” – and I hadn’t even thought of that but maybe that’s why I was drawn to this particular poem in this particular week as life around me starts to feel so much more opened up again (a year out from that original comment!).
Whoever you are, go out into the evening, leaving your room, of which you know each bit; your house is the last before the infinite, whoever you are.
Then with your eyes that wearily scarce lift themselves from the worn-out door-stone slowly you raise a shadowy black tree and fix it on the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world (and it shall grow and ripen as a word, unspoken, still). When you have grasped its meaning with your will, then tenderly your eyes will let it go.
This song started from my listening to a Radiolab podcast episode called “Kleptotherms.” The episode consisted of several stories and I think it was the second story, the one about a young man with schizophrenia named John and an old woman he met on the beach when he was having a bad day, who invited him to sit with her and eat his lunch. I can’t even tell you how much I loved this story and hearing John tell it himself.
And that feels like it makes no sense with the way the song played out. I wrote the first verse and then the chorus where the words “there’s a story here” tumbled out and brought with them “but it doesn’t need telling,” and I thought that was so strange until “at least not in so many words” helped to make a little more sense of the idea.
That night I went to bed and another verse came to me as I was falling towards sleep, so I put it all down in my phone memos to deal with the next day.
The next day – I had a verse with a lovely little story and then another verse describing something more sinister. I was having a hard time making sense of this song but it still felt compelling to me.
So I lived with it another day and night, played it a few more times, worked out the bones of a bridge and last chorus that helped me understand it a little more. This morning I walked the dog and got the lines that feel like a key – “you take it all in, you live it all out.”
Some things are beyond explanation, transcendent in positive or negative ways – beautiful or terrible or neither or both but just not put-into-words-able. These are stories that we probably tell better with our lives than with our words.
Or something like that. There’s a song here but maybe it doesn’t need all that telling, not so many words.
He was feeling so low Couldn’t talk himself down From the edge in the fog in his head She was there on the beach Asking him to sit down And eat his sandwich instead
A young troubled man An old placid woman The sun and the sand and the birds There’s a story here But it doesn’t need telling At least not in so many words
Under stained glass you see him The man of the cloth Pulling wool over sheep’s trusting eyes While the wolves go on howling Outside in the dark And you still have to live till you die
The devil you know The devil you don’t The lies and confessions you’ve heard There’s a story here But it doesn’t need telling At least not in so many words
And you know what you know And you feel what you feel And you wait till the moment is right But it all stacks up wrong On the tip of your tongue And you swallow it back in one bite
You take it all in You live it all out The subject, the object, the verb There’s a story here But it doesn’t need telling At least not in so many words
In the course of writing this song I discovered that Bob Dylan cowrote the song “Wagon Wheel” and also that Darius Rucker of one of high-school-me’s favorite bands Hootie and the Blowfish did a cover of it, in addition to the one I had heard before by Old Crow Medicine Show.
I learned all that because after I wrote this song it kept nagging me that I had copied something somehow. My subconscious went to work and got me the answer, and Google confirmed it and taught me all those other details.
For artistic integrity (and/or because I’m just not taking the time this week for a big recording), I sang this one into my phone.
Here it is, my song for week 18 of #songaweek2021:
I don’t mean to be rude, I mean I never mean to be mean Some days feel no good, so no no good to keep all to myself
Hold me close like a telephone Ring me round with whispers of your love
There’s nothing we can do to change the days we left behind us Every moment’s new, and this one’s telling us we can be too
Hold me close like a telephone Ring me round with whispers of your love
There’s something to be said for everybody saying something Nice and kind of kind to help each other help each other smile
Let’s hold our world like a telephone Ring it round with whispers of our love
I’m guessing I’m not the only one who experienced that social distancing led to emotional distancing this past year. Now that more of my loved ones and myself are fully vaccinated and I’m relishing hugs again, and the world outside is greening up and springing forth, I feel an old familiar longing for closeness and affection coming back, which had been fading. That’s what was going on when I wrote this song for week 17 of #songaweek2021.
(But as with all art, what I brought to the song is in no way definitive. Much of my joy in sharing what I create is knowing it meets others in different ways. And more than once a song I wrote years ago will bring me something new when I bring it out again.)
Nobody told me I’d be sad and lonely, I wasn’t prepared for this I don’t remember how I ended up outside looking in
I think I’ll come back now Return from the somewhere else Land this weary ship I’m coming back home Don’t ask me where I was I never really knew There’s nothing much to tell I just want to come home
I was gonna change the world but the world changed without me I was gonna change the world but the world changed me
I think I’ll come back now Return from the somewhere else Land this weary ship I’m coming back home Don’t ask me where I was I never really knew There’s nothing much to tell I just want to come home
There’s pits you never might get to the bottom of There’s rivers flowing any which way but love There’s words nobody with breath ever should have said Reverberating inside your head
All is falling, falling down Falling down on the ground of God
There’s peaks you never might wish to descend from There’s roads going every direction home There’s songs of healing and joy about to be sung Vibrating on the tip of your tongue
All is rising, rising up Rising up from the ground of God
Be still children be still Breathe the breath of life Be not afraid To give it back
There’s no beginning or end to the question There’s battles around you and war within There’s hope that hits you like a bolt from the blue Obliterating what you thought you knew
All is falling, falling down Falling down on the ground of God All is rising, rising up Rising up from the ground of God
Julia Bloom 