About “Moon Song”

I distinctly remember this song’s origins for their humble–and heavenly–nature.

I wrote “Moon Song” on a cool night in mid-late May, 2016. After my kids and Abi were asleep, I went out to my newly converted garage/studio to write a song with my third cup of tea in hand. The tedious first minutes of the writing session stretched into a quarter of an hour, and I soon found myself too full of tea, and needing relief.

The moon was full; big and bright as I stood beneath it in the cold air, outside. It was just the inspiration I needed. I returned to the studio freshly relieved and ready to write…

The Lyrics

I watch that big, bright face in the moon
grow small as my lifetime waxes long,
and I remember that they call it “new”
and I wish that that age-old term were true.

Because March’s moon I’ll lionize—
see him larger than my tiny life—
with all the swelling buds
of the springtime thaws
chilled by the last breath of that old man…
But, by April I’ve grown sheepish again.

It seems by the time
the moon comes around
there is nothing new that I have found.
Just the same damn boys and girls of Father Time
wound up in their mother’s fateful line…

To the end we may twirl on this little blue ball—
summer after spring,
winter after fall.
Storming in with the rain,
toiling under the sun
to make something of all we think we have begun.

What comes in like a lion goes out like a lamb.
I’ve seen that over and over and over and over again.

So I watch that big, bright face in the moon
grow small as my lifetime waxes long,
and I remember that they call it “new”
and I wish that that age-old term were true.

 

The humble origins of this song suit it well. My 30th birthday hit me about five months before I wrote it, and I was still reconciling myself to being 30. For some reason the change from my 20’s to my 30’s made me feel time as I hadn’t quite felt it before.

It felt like I was watching time as I stared at the moon that spring night. The cyclical growth and decay we see in the phases of the moon mark our months, and pile up into our years and lifetimes.

I’ll permit myself the freedom to reason by analogy here not because it is valid, but because, to me, it is inviting. The cycles of the moon marking time’s movement are like the cycles of the seasons marking life’s movement. All such things turn and return, grow and decay, begin and end. But each ending lands in the midst of a million beginnings, and so on and so forth.

“In like a lion, out like a lamb.” They say March does that. I don’t know where the saying came from or what it really is supposed to mean, but it doesn’t matter. We can imagine that the moon of March heralds the coming of spring–that same spring for which we hoped in “A New Dawning”. That hope of spring is palpable, and a thing we’ve all known at some point. It is like our ambition to do something with our lives, which is a similar feeling that waxes and wanes with the passage of time and the seasons.

For me that ambition to make something of my life among all human lives comes in like the spring, and the big feeling of newness and possibility; but, it goes out, too, with a sinking sense of inferiority and failure. I am humbled on the one hand by the grandness of life, and on the other by the futility of it all.

This is the way time seems to pass. Its movement suggest progress; but things tend to remain basically the same. The same need, want, ambition, hope, fear, etc. Time doesn’t seem to progress in a line or a forward moving cycle. Instead, it looks and feels like a static cycle going around and around.

At least, that’s how time seemed to me when I was writing “Moon Song”. Life seemed fated to be as it was, it looked like we were all bound up in it, and unable to break the cycle.

Incidentally, the second verse “It seems by the time…boys and girls of Father time…etc,” is rife with loose mythological allusions. It is one of the verses in the album that I feel least satisfied with. It is supposed to be a reference to Father Time, erroneously associated with Chronos and/or Cronus, who may be married to Rhea, or some fictional goddess of my own creation who is the goddess of necessity. In my mind she held a distaff, on which she spun yarn representing the inevitability of time–if you follow the yarn from one end it will inevitably lead to the other end. And according the speaker in this song we are all wound up in this line that denotes our inescapable fate. We twirl on this “little blue ball” in perpetual insignificance, convinced of our importance, and convinced of our power to create, but it all ends the same way. And so it goes.

This song is, again, about learning humility. The irony of it is that I continue to wish for something truly new, that is, I continue to wish to break that cycle–however futile and audacious that wish may be. And that seems to be the nature and dynamism of life.

What You’re Hearing

That’s my old Harmony archtop again. I was going for a thumpy, facile waltz/carousel sound. The trumpet motive was one that I came up with early in this song’s life. The euphoniums following the bass line in the guitar was a later decision, but I liked the obviousness of it, and Abi said that it “made her happy” when she first heard it. So I left it.

The chord progression is cyclical, as is the whole structure of the song. It is obviously meant to reinforce the message of the song, and the fact that I end on the V7 instead of the I is also meant to underscore the endlessness of the cycle.

 

Anyway, thanks for reading, and thanks for listening. And if you do like these posts or this album, or if you hate them both, please let me know. I really do like to hear from you!