This was a song that was in nearly every Navigators set list. We often closed with it. We used to call it "One Line Overplayed." Don't get me wrong. I think it's a great song, but I do find it ironic that we were often summed up by one song that was about not summing things up.
This song started with a guitar rift that was easy to play over and over. I had recently started playing plucking a lot of songs on guitar instead of strumming. I had started it with "Take it for a Ride" and continued with "Hold On" and then "One Line Epitaph." I was inspired to play in this style by Danny Flanigan, who did a lot of finger plucking (and did it better). As much as I liked the music, I couldn't find the words for the song.
One day (and I wish I could tell you more about that day, but it was otherwise unventful), I wrote three songs. This was one of them. I can't recall if completing this song allowed me to write two new ones, or whether writing two new songs gave me the momentum to finish this song. Again, this didn't seem like a particularly eventful day. I was living in Inwood at the time with my girlfriend, though she was out of town. She was out of town a lot, and while I was trying to find regular employment, I had come to discover that people in their late 20s aren't as exciting to employers as people in their early 20s.
People used to joke about how quickly I could get a job. "What? Dewey got home? He'll have a job at the end of the day." I found myself going to the pizzaria to buy a slice with spare change. The one good thing about being unemployed is that you have time to write, and I did.
One thing that had been floating in my mind for some time is the fact that in the music business you have to easily identified. I wasn't very good at that. In fact, the people that I was most interested in, like Bob Dylan, had reinvented themselves several times over. Neil Young was a folksy singer, but then he played grungy music with Crazy Horse. He was a solo artist, but then he released a widely successful album with Crosby, Stills and Nash. Me, I wrote all kinds of music. Folk, pop, rock, and some really weird stuff. And yet, I was always told that I needed to present myself as one thing. I probably should have listened, but I approached songs with an attitude that you shouldn't censor yourself. That meant that I wrote songs very quickly (sometimes), but it also meant that what came out didn't necessarily fit into an easily identifiable pattern.
After the release of Who Are The Navigators and Lost and Found, I had been constantly asked what my signature sound was going to be, and I could never answer that question. I hated to be limited in that way. "One Line Epitaph" was about that feeling of not wanting to be summed up. I wanted to be like people are- multi-faceted. If anything, that was what defined me as an artist.
At the same time, it's not just about the music industry. Aren't we all being pigeon-holed at one time or another? Aren't people often resorting to their first obvious impressions of the world? We want simple boxes (grids) that we can check off instead of mysteries (oceans) that we might never solve. If I was a riddle, I didn't want to be solved.
I think my relationship at the time also fed this idea. I was very much attracted to a person who seemed to want to define who I was, and I didn't want that. Of course, I might be guilty of the same thing. It's hard to say.
At any rate, we played this song for a while in the version that on Meet the Navigators. I think both Phelim and Andrew felt that there needed to be more. Andrew pushed for a kind of "structural solo" and that became the instrumental interlude that led to the "Love, Hallejuha, yeah" refrain, which I think Phelim may have actually come up with. The song ultimately became epic, if you listen to the version on Glory, Glory. I like that version, but I also kind of like the original version. We recorded it again, and again, and I hope that the other versions see the light of day. Even the song can't be summed up.
The song made it's way into the movie Dream Riders, but it was never released as a single, because it was a ballad (for at least part of the song). Structurally, the song doesn't follow normal song patterns either. I couldn't even tell you if its finished. Years later when I had moved back to Louisville for good (presumably), I ran into Brian Cronin, who mentioned that the song had really reached him at an impressionable time in his life. I ended up playing with him in a band, and I think a lot of it has do with his telling me that. Songs have a life of their own.
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