In My Time of Darkness

This song was written shortly after 9/11.  It has a lot of that day in it, but it really is a portrait of my life before and after. It is both largely fictitious, and as true as any song that I have written. In my mind, there is a video for this song, because the images are very clear, and they correspond with the words, but not in the way that you might think. 

Yes, I started out in Memphis, which might be a code for Louisville, which to people in New York City at the time (like me), could be interchangeable.  But the Memphis I had in mind was Egypt. See, I saw my soul and life as a continuation of previous lives. Not based on some scientific fact, or religious creed, but on some personal feeling. Spiritual or Freudian? I'm not sure. I ended up in Dallas, which is a strange place, because I had never been there, though my family had been there before I was born. 

"Walls crashed all around me," was a direct reference to 9/11 as were the next two lines. I was broke. I bought things using a credit card that I had no means of paying off. I was in New York City after 9/11 and I had no job, and I had no leg to stand on and no truth to set me free. Which sounds like the point in the blog where you bemoan your very existence, and why you are so cursed to be the person you are, but instead the song shows a bright side, because in my time of darkness there was something that pulled me through. 

You could easily interpret the chorus to be about a woman who comes and saves the day. It's a love song, right? But in my mind, the "she" in question was not an earthly woman, but a feminine manifestation of god. I was always impressed that Phelim with his celtic heritage knew this implicitly. It's a shame that some people understand the divine through one particular gender, and that gender is typically male. There's nothing wrong with the male divine, but it's only half the picture. I was raised in the world of the masculine divine, but then I read The Mists of Avalon, and I developed a genuine connection to the concept.

The second verse talks about "rifling through the Keys," which is a reference to my moving to Key West after college in the hopes that my band might "make it", but I was not in a place to make anything. Then the song talks about how the "world around me, brought me to my knees," and that is a reference to having cancer, and little finding myself crawling on my knees after gigs, because of the pain. 

The next two lines are simply two of the lines I am most proudest of:

God seemed cold and distant; like an ice-capped mountainside

Carried the mark of Cain on me, and had no place to hide.

See, I was/am a flawed person, and that made me feel bad about myself. I had the mark of Cain. And the male God was a very distant one for me, but the female one, was there in my time of darkness. I understand as a history teacher why early cultures revered the Mother Goddess before they had a thought about the God the Father. 

Of course, the Mother isn't all hugs and kisses. Read The Mists of Avalon and you'll understand. At any rate, the second verse is about me personally. "When I think upon the many things I've tried," is about how I was thinking about me trying to be a successful musician. and how when I saw "the world that could have been" I was always saddened. As much as the pull of being an artist would rock my boat up and down, and it seemed to never settle, I knew that "still without that vision, I knew I'd disappear."

Still, the frustrations would mount. I would "stand close to exhaustion" and I would fail. Again and again, I failed. But when I was being my most spiritual self, I wouldn't look towards my "evil twin" and I wouldn't lose the woman who was the earthly symbol of the divine force that moves the universe. I did, but the sentiment still is valid. 

We recorded this at Threshold studios, and in my opinion, this is the best thing that we recorded there, but this is the most personal thing that we recorded there. The performance with Andrew and Phelim doesn't try to hard. We took "Here Comes the Hurricane", "Just Getting Started", and "One Line Epitaph" and we took those songs to 11, but this song we played at the number that it was. I'll let you decide what number it is.