Run to the Rock

This song was written the same day I wrote "One Line Epitaph." Read that post for more context. That was a productive day. I had tried to write a very different song that was personal, but I found that version boring. It creates a lot of pressure to be interesting, and I suppose to some people I am, but not to me. Sisyphus? Now that's an interesting character. For some reason, I had a paperback copy of Camus' Myth of Sisyphus with me in Inwood. I always like Camus. Something about his idea of the absurd hero appealed to me. I wrote songs about his books The Plague and The Stranger. Not many authors have inspired me like that.

While I understood that Camus was arguing that Sisyphus has no choice but to see meaning in his mission of pushing the rock up the hill, I wanted to tell the story from the inside. What would it be like? What would such a figure be like?

Camus suggests that Sisyphus was most interesting as he walked down hill having watched the giant rock roll back down. He knew it would happen. He goes to push it back down hill. Now is his moment of reflection. How does he make sense of his toil?

What interested me most about the story is how timeless it felt.  It was both ancient and modern. It was an essential expression of what it meant to be human. I loved the fact that in my song Sisyphus refuses to ever repent even it meant ending his toil.  He would rather spend eternity pushing a rock up the hill then to give an all-powerful god the one power that only he has: free-will.

At any rate, I got Andrew Emer to record a version- just the two of us. We recorded a couple of songs for a holiday CD. I gave Phelim one, and he thought that it should be a Navigators song, which I hadn't expected. We occasionally played it live, but it was a real campfire song that stood out in our more raucous sets. Ultimately, we ended up recording it for the Cowboy Sessions at Glory, Glory. We ended up nixing the song, because we weren't happy about the ending.

As I was looking at the Navigators material this year, I had originally sought to not try to rejigger the songs, but I had since re-recorded a version for myself, and I was much happier with the end. It was a loop of the chorus over and over again and a fade out. So I took the original mix, copied and pasted the ending, and then added some more vocals, and an organ. Of all the tracks that I re-released here, this is the one I fiddled with the most. I don't know if I solved the problem of the ending, because unlike the other tracks, I can't listen to it with the same objectivity. I suppose my own Sisyphean task would be to record the same song over and over. Interesting how I wrote "Run to the Rock" and "One Line Epitaph" on the same day.