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punk

riffs from the air

natural history




The First Song

Lord knows I been a gypsy too long,
Searchin' for the land of the brave and the strong
And the good and the wise,
And the land where a life ain't so long.

The sea is just a poundin' my mind,
And now that I know what I want, I can't find
What I see with my eyes,
And I wish that my death would be kind.

I'm standin' at my door in the rain,
The sun has left my mind, and I'm alone again
With my quiet disguise,
And the rain is just the voice of my pain.

 Context & Inspiration

At Sunday sings and family reunions, songs were what everybody knew. You didn't write them, they were passed down through the generations.

My Mom's piano, with its sheet music, probably introduced me to the notion of actually writing a song. As we grow up, fragments of songs enter us from the environment and become our unconscious musical baggage, percolating out in unexpected ways.

I wrote a bunch of mystical songs and love songs in high school, but my first song for Wet Fur was simply called "The First Song". That emotional intensity re-emerged later in my punk songs.

The modern folk poetry of Young Marble Giants and the self-consciously naive sampling of Penguin Cafe Orchestra, revisiting unconscious baggage from childhood, were touchstones for both Roundhouse and the early Terra Incognita. But the themes of all my later songs came from the natural places I knew and loved: the Ohio Valley and the Mojave desert.

I've written hundreds of songs, but the older I get, the less I care about writing songs and the more I care about sharing them.



young marble giants



penguin cafe orchestra