Airstream
© 2008 David Wilcox
Released 2008 What Are Records
This album was conceived, written and recorded in David's Airstream trailer. Recording engineering by Ric Hordinski, mixing by Chris Rosser. Graphic design by Jane Ware.
Guitar tunings and capo positions for 'Airstream' songs available here
Tracks:
Notes from David:
Welcome to AIRSTREAM. Please keep hands and feet inside the vehicle until it has come to a complete stop. These are travel songs, but hopefully they're not just postcards of what I've seen. Each of these songs has a particular vantage point, but together they outline an inside journey that shows not just what I've been looking at, but rather how our travels have changed the way I see. You might want to wait until you've made up your own mind about these songs before you read this, but if you're curious, here's how I think they fit together. In these days of random playback, I see a sequence to these songs, and this is how it goes:
Right On Time
Forever Now
Perfect Storm
Three Brothers
Plain View
The Reason
Reaper Sweepstakes
Falling For It
To Love
Little White Lie
This Old Car
Never Change
No Telling
The Crossings
Not that I always start with the ending, but it's really a circle of songs and the end informs the beginning, so let me say that the song THE CROSSINGS was inspired by visiting some friends of a friend. Ken and Joyce Beck were people we had to meet. Elizabeth Lesser who co-founded the Omega Institute told us about a place in Austin, Texas called The Crossings. We pulled up with our Airstream trailer and had the experience that this song describes. Nance and I and Nate had sold our home and cast off the bow line ready to be moved by the wind and current. Nate was 12 when we left, and when we got home he was 14 and all our lives had changed. In the two years we wandered, we met some wonderful, inspiring people. There were small time movie makers who quit their day jobs to work at what they loved. There were potters and painters and poets and weavers and glass blowers and story tellers and life coaches and musicians, people who left their communities and people who started communities, and even families who sailed around the world, but here in Austin was a place called The Crossings that was founded to help people begin their journey. It's a place to go to be inspired, to set sail. Whenever we would tell folks about our travels, most people we talked to said that they had always dreamed about taking off like we did. But there was something about that first mile. There's a transition from dreaming to drifting, the letting go into the current, before any plans take shape, that scares us. My old song SLIPPING THROUGH MY FIST is about that letting go, but this song is about what happens next. We are met. We eddie out into a strong current that is life itself. And things happen that make us shake our heads and smile at the choreography of the coincidence. The Timing of it all. We would have missed all this if we had stayed home another minute. But we left right on time. And this brings us back up top to the beginning of the AIRSTREAM CD.
The song RIGHT ON TIME is celebrating the bold confidence we feel when we set out into the start of something, knowing that it's right. Oh, it could be love. It could be a wake up call, down deep in your soul. It takes what it takes, but when we've hurt enough, it's time. When the yearning to bloom becomes stronger than the fear of opening, the bud becomes the blossom. We dare to trust what must be - rather than what was. Once we get unstuck, even the old pain gets changed into gratitude. This place in the circle of songs is where the roller coaster goes from click, click, click up that first hill, to then tipping the top and transforming all that potential energy into exhilaration. Nance would smile at how excited I would get when it was time to hook up the trailer in the early morning on the days when we would roll. Yesterday is exactly where we've gotten to so far, and today we're perfectly poised to get to where we're going, wherever that is. And the frontier we're headed for isn't anywhere on the map. It isn't something you could take a picture of. It isn't something to look at, it is more a new way of seeing, a change in how we look at the world and ourselves. The feeling of certainty that we feel at the start doesn't mean that the path is certain. It just means that we certainly have to set off into the mystery. There is wisdom in that certainty that makes us take a risk and venture out like a fool. Sometimes the wisdom of it only shows up much later. That's what the next song is saying.
FOREVER NOW comes from a true story. Years ago, when I was first telling a friend that I had found the woman I was going to marry, they knew me well enough to doubt it. But the way I described Nance, my friend could tell that I was serious. So with a camera pointed right at me, my friend said: "I dare you to say that again," and clicked a picture as I made my oath. The idea for the song was that there are some photographs that take a very long time to develop. Who knew, looking at that image of my confident smile, that my words would stay true? But over time it appears that the young version of myself did have a vision of the future. Getting there, however, is another story.
The times that define us are often the times of adversity. PERFECT STORM looks at the tough times as if that's the place where our teacher shows up. The sister song to this is DEEPER STILL, where our surface world cracks apart and we get to look down into how deep life gets. But this song is about looking up from the yearning we feel, that voltage between heaven and earth that arcs in the human heart. When I was making my way home down a path in the dark as the storm was blowing in, it was the brief flashes of lightning that showed me where I was and where I was going. I am very grateful for those times when my heart is full to bursting with a flash of inspiration that feels like the purpose of my being here. I get quite a charge out of knowing that we are given the task of being a conduit for illumination in this world; we put our lives across that distance where this longing turns to light. My old song SHOW THE WAY says: don't give up on being the change, like a candle in the dark, just because the world needs so much light. But this song takes it farther and says: even our despair is cause for hope. There is a sacred voltage that burns in our hearts, in our awareness of all that needs to change. This soulful yearning is the wind that drives our sails, and the fact that there's plenty of it in this perfect storm means that we will never have to live in the doldrums.
The next song is an example of the tension (another word for voltage) between the stormy situation we are given and the peace we yearn for. By the time we get to the chorus, the THREE BROTHERS are the three religions that land on the same rock in the same city. Their sister, Faith, has been taken captive in their struggle. But before that, it was just a simple story of one family with three sons who realize they have been set up. Their dad was not just careless; this is no mistake. Maybe we are given this stormy situation precisely because it is the best testing ground to see if we can live out what we believe. It's a perfect storm at the global level instead of the personal. I told the story about one family to show the storm from a fresh perspective. It seems to me that the new frontier of what's possible for humans depends on getting outside our old ways of seeing to get a fresh perspective.
One of the subplots of our Airstream journey was to set out to find our new home, and it turns out it was in PLAIN VIEW. Being in motion made us better at seeing what was around us because we had traveler's vision, that ability to appreciate what the locals take for granted. But after finding many places that looked good to settle in, we came around to seeing where we came from as the best home for us. On a large scale, there's a global change that's just dawning on us very slowly. Long ago, we got to see the earth from the moon, and it started to wake up our traveler's vision. Now, in our work for peace, people all over the world are meeting in the spirit of love and compassion and seeing beyond the outward forms of the religions that hold us in separation. My experience of compassion in action shows me that the future frontier is not out and away from each other, but rather a quantum turn to the heart of the life we are made of.
In all these songs so far, the traveler gets a vision of what's possible and it inspires him to set off on a journey to find it. Whether it's love or music or peace building, the initial vision gets us way out in open water, and only then, when it's too late to have second thoughts, do we realize that this journey will require much more of us than we thought. Of course. Otherwise we would never dare to begin. Maybe that's THE REASON love is blind.
But of all the things we worry about, most will never happen. The REAPER SWEEPSTAKES is a laugh at those fears that would keep us from ever really living. The evening news does a fine job of reinforcing the bars-on-the-windows mentality, and selling the home security systems that keep us behind those bars, but aside from making them a bunch of money, the marketing of fear doesn't add much to life. It sure does make us easy to control though.
The song FALLING FOR IT is about the manipulation of our fear that happened after 9/11. At first, I was going to write the song as a simple story about a fist fight. A guy gets punched, he hits back to defend himself, but, hey, while he's at it, he goes outside and starts another fight supposedly so he won't get punched again. I was tempted to write it in story form because it would work from the inside, like a parable. On our travels around this beautiful country, we found in many conversations that people were nervous talking about politics. A lot of people have been convinced that it's not a conversation, it's a war between two sides, and once we're divided, we can't talk to each other about real issues. It seems we've been taught to fear each other and retreat behind our name-calling and team colors. But real discussion is crucial for our form of government to work. Our founding fathers wanted us to feel free to speak our concerns about national policy, so they decided that our leader should be a president and not a king. And here I was, feeling scared to voice my own opinion! So I decided to have courage, make the song simple, and speak my heart directly.
I wasn't so brave with the next song. TO LOVE is a story that starts off with the familiar setting of the old joke about three people of different faiths who are standing at the gates of heaven. They each feel confident in condemning the others and their judgment brings to light the limits of their compassion. The test of how they treat each other shows their true beliefs more than any superficial membership in some club. This song was written before THREE BROTHERS, but it works better if it follows, I think.
LITTLE WHITE lie is the oldest song on the CD; I've been working on it for quite a few years. I finally found the changes that made it work for me, and of all the songs on this disk, I like the sound of the guitar on this one best. It's a song about how slimed I felt when I was trying to keep a secret, and what it did to my heart and soul. I sang about the secret a long time ago in the song THE BROKEN PLACES, but in this song, the specific secret is not the point. The idea that a secret is a toxic thing that we carry around inside led to the song being told from the point of view of a drug mule. I like the way the song blurs the distinction between the two. I usually like to play music to live up to; songs that inspire me to be who I want to be. But sometimes I need songs to remind me of hurtful places I never want to fall into again.
THIS OLD CAR comes next to lighten things up. I have always been a car whisperer, and this song was dictated to me by the voice of our old Toyota Previa who we named The Shark. The deal was that I'd fix Sharky in exchange for him reminding Nate about how many miles are invested in him. They say it takes a village to raise a child, but it also takes a couple hundred thousand miles and The Shark carries traces of all those memories. From the baby's first ride home from the hospital, to the toddler in the car seat; every trip to soccer games and swim meets and karate and tutoring, it's all there, every younger version of Nate that ever was. The Shark was delivering them all to arrive at who he is now.
In all our travels and all our changes through our lives, there's a spark of who we are that stays the same, and the song NEVER CHANGE is about Nate growing up, but it's also about me reaching the end of my life and making my peace with what I've done and what I dreamed of doing. I feel a bittersweet comfort when I sing this song, as if there's an echo of an unsung harmony. I have stood on land directly above an underground river, and that's the sense I get that something's moving underneath this song. It knows something I don't about what we lose and what we gain along this journey. For me, this is the heart of the whole CD, and I would have started the disk with this song but I thought it would be better to lead up to it.
I have spent my life trying to find words for the unspeakable depth and height and sweetness of this life, and sometimes I just want to say: "Ah, sorry, I guess you just had to be there." Maybe there's NO TELLING where we've been. There was a seed for this song buried in the lyric of NATIVE TONGUE, but it was Nate who said the bit about the view not fitting into the camera that day we stood on Hurricane Ridge in the Pacific Northwest. We can try to describe the depth of life with our words, but when we bring those words to the surface, they turn to bland clichés just like bright living coral dies and turns the color of cement. And as for the highest mountain top bliss of my life, I would love to be able to leave a trail of words to follow, but like the bread crumbs in the children's story, words won't mark the trail. We may have the company of the poets and explorers who have been there before us on the high places, but when it comes to finding our own sacred ground, "There ain't nobody here can walk it for you." Which brings us back around to the beginning of the journey, when we each set out from safe harbor and head toward THE CROSSINGS. Closer to home than we've ever been, and never so far away. I'll meet you there.
David Wilcox
