My Escape

I went running down the hill

I went running and I ran so fast I almost fell

I dove into a lake

I’m no swimmer, and I barely made the other side

But I was finally on my way

On my way to making my escape

 

I heard the howling, and the cries

I thought about potential alibis

 

I flew deep into the woods

Barely off the ground, like a broken kite I’d found

All twisted up and turning

Every single muscle burning

But it felt good to be on my way

On my way to making my escape

 

And I, I heard the stars explode

I watched the moon erode

And that’s why I’m escaping

And I, I heard the screaming bees

Felt the fiery breeze

And that’s why I’m escaping now

 

How long can this go on?

 

I won’t be back

No, I won’t be back this way again

Maybe I should stop and take it all in

Fire rising on the hill

It’s beautiful, still

 

Nothing beats being on my way

On my way to making my escape

 

No more hiding in plain sight

It was deepest darkest night before I realized

I’m not the man they think I am

So without a map in hand,

 

I ran.

 

I ran, and I ran.

 

 

 

This song revealed itself through a series of mistakes as I tried to learn how to use my new Digital Audio Workstation. For years, I recorded my music on an old analog TASCAM four-track tape machine, and converted it to digital. I recorded a whole album’s worth of songs that way. I really miss the option of manually adjusting the actual faders, and watching the little red needle on the VU meters, but you were really limited in how many tracks you could bounce without getting a ton of tape hiss, so I finally outgrew it. I chose what the experts said was the most user-friendly DAW out there, Presonus Studio One. Basically I just jumped in, and started experimenting. Suddenly there was a whole range of choices. Sometimes having too many choices can kill creativity; but in this case the song took off in a direction that I didn’t consciously plan.  The instrumental break is in an odd time meter, because I wanted the listener to feel uneasy and off-balance, like the narrator. I tried to leave room for ambiguity in the lyrics, without being obtuse. Writing songs is a little bit like assembling a puzzle- you have to play around with the various parts before you can be sure that they fit together correctly. That’s what happened here.

 

In terms of influences, I can point to two artists that I think of when I hear this track. First Peter Gabriel;

 

 

This cut is off his album “Melt” from 1980. Like Peter (at least at that point in time), I don’t like a lot of ride cymbals in the mix. There are no cymbals whatsoever on Melt, and the drumming, mostly by Jerry Marrota, is really fantastic. I love this record so much I hunted down the German language version “Ein Deutsches Album” on vinyl, which I prefer in some ways. They fooled around with gated reverb and other treatments on the drums throughout this record. At the time, it was pretty revolutionary. Beautiful atmospherics here- relaxing, hypnotic main riff, with a howling instrumental break that comments on the ironic lyrics.And then there's an awesome coda with Jerry, as the mind of the narrator disintegrates. A flat out brilliant track.

 

The second song that this makes me thinkof is “The Battle of Evermore’’ by Led Zeppelin. The Asian/North African harmonic scale includes a lot of half tones that are not widely used in pop music, and there’s an affinity between the drones of mandolin laden Celtic music and the stuff you’d hear coming out of a minaret in Turkey or Morocco. I hear it all on this track, particularly with the incredible vocal arrangement.

 

This is the only time someone else besides Robert Plant sang on a Zeppelin track. It’s the great Sandy Denny on background vocals, of Fairport Convention fame. When I was a kid, this track would be one I might often skip over to get to the more straight-forward rockers. But over the years it has continued to haunt me, and it’s propulsive mandolin and guitar interplay never fails to impress.

 

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