Lyrics

When I started writing songs in my late twenties, I had no idea of where that would take me, or whether it was a calling worth following. But song lyrics gave me a gratification that poetry did not, and within five years I had turned out about forty. Many were forgettable, but this is a baker’s dozen that I remember fondly. Several other of my early songs, including some that I cowrote with Andrée, appear in later lists.  This includes: 

  Reflecting Andrée’s and my Irish heritage, most of these songs are set in or evoke the emotional terrain that my favorite poet W.B. Yeats, called the land of heart’s desire. A few play more generally with imagined landscapes of the Celtic Fringe, and two of them—“Banks of the Rye” and “Valley of Yarrow”—are set in Scotland. Early on in my fascination with medieval balladry, I adopted the alias Alec of Yarrow, and the tug of that name, although not the name itself, can also be heard in our first “Skip Yarrow” CD, Gather. The earliest of these lyrics, “Out of a Celtic Fog,” is fifty years old; the most recent is “Elfin Welcome.” 

Several of these country-flavored songs appeared in the wake of the 2008 economic meltdown, which gutted so many working families’ savings. One of them, “Waiting on Release,” is forty years old, reflecting my youthful outrage at predatory capitalism. All of them speak to the grit of ordinary people: the folks with dirty fingernails and rugged hearts whom the Rolling Stones, a generation ago, called the salt of the earth.   

Raised in a military family, I have tried all my life to reconcile my disgust with warmongers with my respect for those who serve honorably in their nations’ service. 

This antiwar but pro-soldier attitude animates most of the songs in this collection. 

The work-in-progress Skein of Arms received an artistic development grant from the Puffin Foundation.

  I was raised and educated mostly in the Northeast, but I’ve spent a good deal of my life in the South, and these songs reflect that adopted affinity. Most are set in Texas, where my Texan wife Andrée and I have lived on and off for thirty years. “Longhair Blues” recounts an unhappy misadventure in normally friendly Louisiana, and “Jeannette” is a birthday song for Andrée’s Cajun mother. “Mountains of Puebla” recalls our visit years ago to the Mexican village of Llano Verde. “Dance with Me Again” and “Watermelon Road” are set in rural Georgia, “Black Heart” in Florida.   

In the Anglo-American folk tradition, ballads are narrative songs with simple repetitive melodies and regular rhyme schemes. The songs in this section roughly fit that description, although their stories depart from the old ballads’ focus on love, treachery, heroism, and death. Because they are longer than most of my poems, I felt they worked better as “story songs” than as simple lyrics.

  This collection contains a dozen songs that struggle not so much with religion per se as with the challenge of finding joy in the world after Zarathustra’s famous announcement of the death of God. If there is a spiritual sensibility here, it’s some amalgam of Buddhist acceptance, Blakean mysticism, and liberation theology. Once a Catholic always a Catholic, the Jesuits used to say. That is liturgically false but emotionally undeniable.

This is a collection of elegies, most of them for friends or relatives. The exceptions are “Dark

Wood of Katyn,” which remembers the victims of the Katyn forest massacre of 1940; and

“Epitaph,” which considers my own mortality.