Dark Waters Run (RPM)

Ok, everybody. I hope you can hang in there on this one. Yes it’s longer. This is the fruit of Steve and my’s first collaboration. He’d heard me do this at a party, got in touch with me, and said, “I’d like to collaborate on this, if you’re okay with that”. We finally got our chance, and I told him this thing I’d heard ever since I wrote it: this backing track of pedal steel, not traditional country stlye, but this floating thing, like watching an eagle fly from above. Well, he came back to me, said, “I’ve got something for you, I hope it’s ok, I did the pedal steel track, but I threw something else in there too. It’s a Soprano sax solo.” Up until then I didn’t know he played much sax, and never in my head did I hear a soprano sax to this tune. But, hey, part of collaborating with someone is to let them bring to the muse what’s in their soul. Well, I listened. And then I listened again. God… It’s beautiful. And, it fits. Damned if I know how or why, but he captured the dream in this song. It was another song that was supposed to be you know, “A simple song”. mostly about my loneliness for the open country in the west. (I know, it’s odd, I feel lonely missing being somewhere where I feel like I’m the only person for miles, it’s hard to exlain). But also about how it is when you get above daily life, you contact something more, something that goes beyond what we have in our face all the time and call “reality”. It’s probably more than a little self revealing. And, for me, it never fails to take me back to riding my Appaloosa, Moon Cloud, up into the Cascades, into rare and thin air, into mountain peaks of bare stone, into views that went for hundreds of miles. And the Dark Waters, they’re those things within us that cloud our vision, twist our perceptions, skew our interpretations of our experiences….
Dark Waters Run
I ride my pony
Up to the hills
Give him his head, let him
Roam where he will
Into the highlands
Of bare shining stone
High above
Places the dark waters
Places of the dark waters
Places the dark
Waters run

I take only
My saddle and my bedroll
I want nothing
From a life that’s not life
I want to come empty
Into the land where the lightning
Shatters away
Chains of the dark waters
Chain of the dark waters
Chains of the dark
Waters run

I wanta hear
The voice call to me
Out of this silence
Cross over the sea
Rise from the ground
Echo the sky
Roll away the stone
From my eyes and my heart

I need a sky
Wide and free above me
Need to look upon a land
Uncluttered by man
Where time is a wind
And its sands they are blowing
To cover and erase
Traces of the dark waters
Traces of the dark waters
Traces of the dark
Waters run

I wanta hear the rustle
Of my footsteps in the sand
Hear the voices of the ancients whispered in the pines
I wanta hear the wisdom given
as the breeze stirs the sage
To soothe away and heal
Wounds of the dark waters
Wounds of the dark waters
Wounds of the Dark
Waters run

I wanta hear
The voice call to me
Out of this silence
Cross over the sea
Rise from the ground
Echo the sky
Roll away the stone
From my eyes and my heart

For those of you whose nights
Have gone on forever
For those of you still caught
In the dark waters run
Follow me to the highlands
The bare shining stone
And we’ll live forever free from
Places the dark waters
Places of the dark waters
Places the dark
Waters run

I ride my pony
Up to the hills
I give him his head
Let him
Roam where he will…