Here's another story about a song I recorded last spring at Midtown Island Studios. This one was a bit of a creeper - I was thumbing through my scribblings and scrawlings in one of my notebooks from the year before (I stream a trail of journals and legal pads in my wake) and one random piece of chicken scratch caught my eye:
"Old Desert Moon, I wonder what you think of us below?"
And I was in a reverie - this iconic Sonoran desert I live in, but in black and white. A landscape of silver under a full moon like the one that beamed down on us last night. And in the open, clear-of-static sky in Tucson, the moon seems even bigger, a White Witness to the nocturnal, shady side of human nature.
I'm a Cancer, a moon child, and even though I was brought up a good Roman-Catholic girl, there was always a little pagan part of me that adored looking through my bedroom window, opening the slats of the blinds and communing with that giant white eye peeking through the moss-flecked branches of the oak tree. That was in Jacksonville, Florida, land of trees and scrub, where there's plenty of places the Moon can't see.
But in the desert - we're a wide open book, living out loud. And while the Sun sends us scurrying for cover, the nighttime is when we fling open the windows, come back out to play and entertain La Luna with our oh-so-human antics.
And so the song started writing itself - in a vintage song structure with no real chorus and the reprise, like an old jazz tune:
Old Desert Moon
I wonder what you think of us below
Sleeping in our beds
Dreaming of the day
Or leaning on the windowsill,
staring back at you
Old Desert Moon
Watching what the Devil gets us up to In our trailer trysts
And wild-eyed whiskey fights
Oh the silver-tinged
Stories you have seen
On your very own silver screen
Your old friend, Coyote,
Howls the news of the lonely
And Sister Owl is on the prowl
For a midnight snack
Old Desert Moon
You smile so sweetly from your perch
And all we do is play our little scenes for you
That age old cabaret of lust and steel
Living by feel
Feeding your dreams..