Road Will Wear You Down

The highway is bleeding
Your blood’s red music.

But the road is turning
Its blacktop into you.

You made songs out of dirt,
The dry-dust, parched history
Of your life, the life you lived
Before either roads or music.

You plucked words
Like the strings of a guitar
From the sinews of your heart:
Every syllable a shred of flesh.

You began it with sorrow,
And stories of how
The weak and downcast
Struggle in their need.

You wrote it and you sung it
‘The freeway sets you free’
And took a band out on the road
To give your songs to everyone.

Music carried you to where the freeway
Verges and its neons were echoes and you
Kept on moving, so far ahead of them,
Too fast to be anything but stone.

The gravel roads became a backing track;
Your flight into fortune, the bass-line beating;
Time swept you up, high and sharp,
Like the rattle of a snare drum.

Your songs wore thin with so much singing;
Your heart, made brittle by the crowds
And the love they stole, slipped into the dark
With all the precious things you gave away.

Your quest for fortune was also a song,
From the first chord to the last, unable
To pause while melody carried it.

Fading, it fades away forever.

The road, one day, must wear you down.

© BH, 2017

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A quote from a music producer in Nashville I heard in a documentary about The Shires. It's a counterpoint to the breathtaking optimism of becoming something in the music business.

I thought about how so many singers, song writers and musicians are tested by the voyage, actual and metaphorical: Paul Simon, Elbow, oh, so many songs all tell of the way the road erodes everything in time.

So here it is. With an overlay of our fight to be human (thanks, Justin Currie). You know how it goes: you think you’re on a roll but you’re really in free fall, unable to stop.

      “…the nearer your destination
      The more you're slip slidin' away…”
     – Paul Simon