The ties that bind unraveled on an August night.
Not sure where that first line came from though it might have been from the ancient Gibson I lifted off of the mansion wall in Pawling, New York all those years ago. And there they were. Chords, progressing with a wistfulness and melancholy all their own.
She left his tired love behind, in a laundromat, in black and white.
And there I was, feeling my way in the dark towards this story of slow, painful discernment. “Blue Sky Song.” The whispered closing counterpoint to the record’s lead-off title track, “Lost in America.” A seeker’s spiritual longing, a poser’s empty angst.
The powers that be decided it was time to let him go.
They’ve been there all along, those two. The seeker and the poser. The convert and the con man. In every song. In every novel. Fin and Ransom. Light and dark.
So he went rolling like a tumbleweed across the desert of New Mexico.
But then, tucked about two thirds of the way through, a third perspective emerges. Deeper than the seeker? Deeper than the poser?
Oh that time it was not wasted.
It was the way it had to be.
Whatever sorrow that he tasted set him free.
Here’s to hoping.
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