Daughter of the Moon

Click to hear:  Daughter of the Moon

Notes by the Author:

THE STORY: I spent most of my time living in Waco bored out of my scull. While Bill combated the voracious silence with things like "reading books" and "expanding your mind," I spent my time hanging out a coffee shop. Most of the reason I liked the place was that the owner used to fly planes, and the first story he ever told me was about flying with his lights off above interstates and then flipping on his lights and zooming away like a UFO. There was also a devastatingly attractive 18-year old JC student working at the counter named Emily. She was very, dare I say, mysterious. She had come from some terrible part of Oklahoma and every time I tried to talk to her or anyone else about her time there whoever I was talking to would mutter something vague like, "Well, it’s just better that she got out of there and that she not go back."

The first night Bill and I performed in front of an audience together I was so pumped up (see "Wake Up") that I wanted to blabber with someone, and I talked her into going with me to stare at the Brazos river and the stars. She did eventually tell me something about Oklahoma, but it wasn’t that interesting. What was interesting was that she had a very expansive view of what matter and time were in a Richard Bach, "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" sort of way. She thought that all living things had an aura and a spirit, and that if you just looked at them long and hard enough you could see their life force. She believed that was nothing static or stationary in the universe. You could eventually levitate and fly if only you put your mind in the right way. I tried it but my concentration wasn’t all that good. I never levitated but I was once able to roll off my couch during a football game.

Anyway, one thing she particularly liked was the moon. I like moons, especially full ones, and I like looking at the moon through clouds. The coolest thing I have ever seen is the moon from an airplane when the ground is covered with clouds – totally awesome. I asked her why she liked the moon so much and after she hemmed and hawed a little bit she said, "I feel like the moon is my mother." This song, of course, is about that evening.

For the record, we never slept together, even so much as kissed, and we never did anything even remotely like a date ever again. For my part, I didn’t pursue matters because it felt far too much like I was exploiting a JC student 11 years my junior. For her part, she probably didn’t find me attractive. At any rate, I don’t think she was looking for a long-term relationship. A couple of weeks later I bought her a copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and a much better book by the same author called One. She really liked them both. She liked pentagrams and I bought her one while I was in Chicago and it earned me a hug.

I left Waco without ever really saying goodbye to her. I think she wanted to become a model, and she was certainly good looking enough to do it. What I most remember about the entire encounter was that, for one evening, I very seriously considered the idea that maybe mass and density and physics were much more uncertain than I assumed them to be. For that night, it did seem that if I just tried hard enough, I could levitate.

MUSICAL NOTES: I was originally afraid that the song didn’t have enough lyrics, so I went out of my way to write 5 verses and an instrumental. The result was a song over six minutes long. This version is substantially shorter. Some would argue that makes it better.  I love Bill's guitar lead on this song.

Notes by the Other Guy:

When I first heard Jon’s demo recording of this song, I told him (intending to be complimentary) that it sounded like 80s techno-pop. That demo was dominated by catchy synthesized keyboard hooks, and (since I’d not played it yet) no guitar at all. I loved the song--the lyric alone would justify that--but the musical style I thought Jon was going for reminded me of the synth-driven mid-80s. Jon was horrified. It was as if I’d told him that the song reminded me of the finest speeches of Calvin Coolidge.

At first, my guitar contributions were muted (by me). I assumed that this was a keyboard song, and that I should just fill in the corners with the guitar. But to my surprise Jon kept insisting that this was a guitar song, and that I should be more aggressive. I resisted this for a while, and it’s only Jon’s crafty control of our archive that keeps you from hearing the version I first heard so you can decide which works better. But in the interest of saving bandwidth let me assure you: Jon was right. This is, in fact, a song that the guitar fills out nicely. In performance, this became one of my absolute favorites. We opened our second big live show with this, outdoors at Jeff English’s barbecue, in front of eight desultory fans. It was magical.