Beggar's Paradise

Beggar's Paradise

I wrote this my senior year at Kenyon.  I was having a bit of a renaissance that year, creatively speaking.  I had spent the year previous trying to get my band Satori to achieve something, and I had hit a creative dry spell.  When I first got back to Kenyon, I felt isolated and lost, but then I began writing up a storm.  This was well into the middle of that storm. 

I woke up from a dream, which I couldn't tell you about today, but remnants still hang in the shadows, if I try to picture them.  Something about the dream seemed important, even if there was no apparent logic to it. So I began to write the dream as a song. I think I had started the chorus a couple of days earlier and it was a chorus in search of a song.  I don't know what the song means, but it sure means something. For years, this was the song that I would play to myself as I snuck off to the woods, or stood on my roof in Brooklyn.  I was searching for a place where I could unload my music, but without anyone hearing, ironically. 

There's something about childhood in the song. Deflated party balloons, flashy hats.  I think there's a birthday party in the song. And yet, the song is about adulthood at the same time. The beautiful, beaten girl that you want to save.  That was true to who I was.  I did want to save that girl, but I may have realized that I would do so, by losing myself.  

The song suggests that there may be two of me.  The one in the dream who is the actor- the focus of the action. The one doing.  This is the one who seems so fallible.  The one who is trying to make sense of a bunch of madness, but ends up looking ridiculous.  The other one sings the song and narrates.  That might be what I would aspire to. Or perhaps a higher self.  I wrote a lot of songs with the pronoun "you" when I meant me.  

At any rate, I did write the chorus with some semblance of a level head, because I understand its sentiment.  Well, at least the first part.  See, life is easy when you know just who you are, or maybe if you follow a path that has been laid out for you.  You'll sleep easier that way.  But that doesn't mean you're not as foolish as the one riding out alone into the storm.  The beggar might be on to something.