Well we are almost there folks. Tonight at midnight we should see “Mountain” start to populate digital music partners around the world. The best way that you can help us tomorrow is to go to any of the sites you use, Spotify, iTunes Music, Amazon Music, Google Play, and save the album into your libraries. We hope you all stream the record tomorrow and enjoy it. The more SAVES and streams it gets out of the gate the more attention the digital sites give it for playlists, so we are hoping for a good day with a lot of action tomorrow. We will update tomorrow morning with links.
Today I’ll break down another song from the album, this is “The River”.
It’s funny to me that today there are artists out there like Greta Van Fleet that are obviously trying to copy Led Zep but say they are really influenced by Aerosmith to whatever. To me, I’ve always worn my influences on my sleeve and I’m happy to tell you where they come from. “The River” is a product of me listening and trying to emulate Johnny Cash, Nick Cave and Chris Knight, probably in that order. The thing about it, is when I try to emulate someone else it still somehow comes out sounding like me because I’m emulating, not stealing. There’s a difference.
The story.
Small one stop light town, man is standing just outside of town beside the river watching a car sink with two people in it. One is his wife, one we find out later is the sheriff’s deputy. He’s praying, and crying as he watches them sink down but makes no attempt to save them. Of course we don’t really understand all that in the first verse yet. I set up the chorus so that initially you would not know if the main character is calming a child standing with him, or if he’s thinking out loud to the drowning victims. I wanted that tension, and for the listener to start thinking. The second verse sets up the back story and explains what has transpired. The third verse we find our main character a couple miles from the scene of the crime, a car comes around the corner and stops to check on him, they explain what has happened, which he obviously already knows.
This song is another song of ours that I would describe as “Southern Gothic”. It’s characters are those like people that we knew of growing up in small towns, and these stories are the kind that we read in the papers. There was a time, before our time, in the 50’s when stories like this would make national news. Guess I’ve always been more influenced by historical things. These type songs are movies to me without pictures. Johnny Cash’s stories always were visuals to me, same with Nick Cave and Chris Knight. This is a southern gothic small town film in a three minute song. I listen to it on headphones and it haunts me. Thanks for reading…..
The River
I was standing by the river, just ringing my hands
I was praying to my savior, try to understand
I was watching that chevrolet sinking down
I was crying for my sweet love as she drown
Moonlight shining in the dead of night
Hush little girl it will be alright
Ain’t no secrets in any small town
Ain’t no secret she was running around
Sheriff got a deputy had his eye on her
Thats a hard lesson he had to learn
Moonlight shining in the dead of night
Hush now childl it will be alright
We all gotta go, when we gotta go
We all gotta go, but when we gotta go
I saw headlights coming down the road
They say a car went off the hill down where the river flows
Say it sunk to the bottom and two people drown
Deputy and my wife ain’t been seen round town
Moonlight shining in the dead of night
Hush little girl it will be alright
Solomon 8:7 KJV -Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot sweep it away. If one were to give all the wealth of one’s house for love, it would be utterly scorned.