To Be Free: With the Wind

            I'm going to tell you a few things about this song.  The first is about the writing, and the second is about the recording. Here's the version on Spotify.

The Writing

            Freshman year in high-school was an opportunity to remake myself.  I remember the weekend before school started I had finally succumbed to Bob Dylan.  It was the song "Tangled Up in Blue" and though I had no idea what Dylan was doing I finally learned to take it in.  My brother had been listening to Dylan for a couple of years and I thought he was the funniest sounding thing I had ever heard.  It was a far cry from the perfect harmonies of Simon & Garfunkel.  But succumb, I did and a mix tape that I had made became the soundtrack to my first day of high-school.

Nobody really knew me and I could decide who it was that they would see.  And I took full advantage of this.  I had the advantage of nothing to lose.  I also started classes at an after-school theatre company called Walden Theatre. It was here that I met many of my life-long friends.  Walden put on about four productions a year and held classes for movement, improvisation and playwriting.  My brother and sister had both participated in this program and I was always jealous. 

            My involvement in this program started gradually.  For the first half of my freshman year I only participated on weekends.  This left me free during the week and so I spent a lot of time practicing piano and guitar as well as writing songs.  Having written "To Be Free", I knew that I had the ability to write a good song, but to tell you the truth, I wasn't exactly sure how I did it.  So there was a lot of trial and error.  I would like to think that every song I wrote has some spark of interest in it, I would only venture forth with a precious few.  

            I also was writing stories, poems and I was working on a full-length play.  In retrospect, I see that what I was doing was learning how to write by making every mistake very quickly, but I am glad I did not see it as that at the time, because I know that I would only have been discouraged.  I wanted to believe that everything that I was writing was brilliant.

            I had a very close friend named Dan, whom I had known since I was four and whom I used to pal around with all the time growing up.  He had moved away but was still living in Louisville, but because we were too young to do anything about it, we didn't see each other.  Well, he went to Ballard High with me and we became friends again.  That Christmas, his parents gave him a guitar and he was playing the rudiments quite comfortably by the end of the year. He had soul and the fact that he was such a good friend made playing music that much better. Plus, I got him into Dylan.

            Bob Dylan was a revelation to me.  Like the Monkees, listening to Bob Dylan felt like a secret no one else knew about.  I dressed up as Dylan for Spirit Week.  The more I listened to his music, the more I was in awe. I had written some good songs, I thought, but nothing like Bob Dylan.  How did he do it? Getting two lines to rhyme seemed impossible at times, and Dylan would tell impressionistic stories while weaving words together in all sorts of unusual ways.  

            By the Spring of my freshman year, I had written a long epic poem called, “The Road.”  I showed it to my friend Dan, and he was very impressed.  He liked my songs, and I remember trying to teach him “What we Both Know,” but he had never seemed all that impressed with any of my songs.  I had played them for Eric, and I had gotten a similar reaction. But Dan liked my epic poem, and I showed it to some other kids, and they liked it too. It made me feel like I could be a writer.

            That Spring break, I visited my brother and my sister at Yale.  It had made a real impression on me.  There was something about New England that made an impression on me. Perhaps it was the line in “Tangle Up in Blue” where Dylan sings about heading to the east coast that made me think that this was a place that I belonged.  There was something transformational about the area for me.   

            One day, I was in rehearsals for Much Ado About Nothing.I was talking to my friend Gabe (a fellow actor), and we talked about writing a song together. It was a very creative place. In the play, I was a musician, and so I got to bring my guitar to rehearsals all the time.  I remember trying to write a song that began, “I’m a traveling man, that’s what they call me/I don’t stay in one place, but I stay happy.”  My friend Amy got a good chuckle out of that line.  Probably because I didn’t really fit the persona I was trying to create.  I was trying to find another line to the song, but I couldn’t find one.  Probably because it sucked, but I didn’t know that yet.  I started talking to Gabe about a good story for a song, and we came up with the idea of a guy who falls in love with a girl who kills herself. 

I said I would start the song, and he could finish it, but I ended up writing the whole song in about an hour when I got home that night.  When I saw him next he didn’t seem to mind.  Here’s what I wrote:

Oh, what a summer,

Oh, what a season of wonder,

Saw the light felt the thunder,

Oh, just like the wind.

We all drove to New England

The way up we were all singin'

Road down my ears were just ringin'

Things change with the wind.

When I saw her face my heart stood still

She said that her life had been unfulfilled

And that every flower made will always be killed

Seasons change and move with the wind.

You can run so far and run so fast

You can do what you want but it won't ever last

You run from yourself and you run from the past

But you know things change with the wind.

She asked me what was the point of it all

"We were made to stand up only to fall,"

I said, "You've got to teach yourself to stand tall,"

You gotta teach yourself to stand with the wind.

The next part was just like a dream

I don’t remember much, I remember the scream

She told me that things they aren't what they seem

The illusions fade with the wind.

Oh, what a summer, 

Oh, what a season of wonder

Saw the light felt the thunder

Oh, with the wind

The wind dies down and the wind grows strong

She knew just what she was doing all along

Her voice sounds out like the song

The times will change with the wind.

            Unlike the other songs that I had been struggling with throughout this period, this one came easily.  I wrote it in one sitting.  I could pick out details and say where they came from.  For example, when I was talking about New England, I was picturing New Haven where my sister and brother where in school. And the woman in the song has a tragic quality that I associated with this girl at Walden.  But  I wasn't really trying to make any kind of statement or anything.  I know that it was heavily influenced by Dylan. Unlike most pop songs it has a folk structure.   

The Recording

When I started playing this song in front of other people, it was as close as I could get to a "hit".  People really liked the song, which was really weird, because it's not a pop-song, and wasn't intended to be.  When I finally got around to recording it (13 years after I wrote it), I recorded it for Lost and Found. That's a great album, and you can find it on Spotify, iTunes, etc.  Check it out. We went over every song on that album with a fine-toothed comb.

For a while I thought about putting out that same version on this album.  But I couldn't do it.  I wasn't ready to recycle material for a new album.  This is not a greatest hits, or anything where you expect to hear the same material.  So I decided to re-record it.  At first, it was just going to be me and my acoustic guitar, but I love to tinker in the studio.  Hopefully it's not overdone.  That was not the intention.  The intention was to make a camp-fire version of the song.  Enjoy!