The Felice Brothers, and the Long Return Home

The reason why I brought up the topic of the response song in the first place, is because I wrote one yesterday. I had looked up a video of the Felice Brothers on youtube, and found this song, "Her Eyes Dart Round".
It poured deeply into a part of me, one that I had not let in for quite some time. It was one of yearning for some misplaced nostalgia, of longing to fully love a country and culture that was my own.
It is true, I have always had eyes beyond national borders, and certainly life experience beyond them as well. I never saw it as wanting to leave home as much as I truly wanted to explore, but after finding a part of myself so deeply in this song, this sentiment, this story, to the point where my eyes overflowed- I realized I had missed home. Though I never knew it.


This song stayed with me all night and all the next day. I would just load up the video on my phone to hear it over and over. I sang it to myself in the halls of school the next day. I sang it to strangers in passing who had no idea what I was doing. I could feel a need to respond to it, to pay my own respects as a songwriter to the ones who had mastered a work, and who had inspired me so deeply.

The form I picked up quickly, as well as the general chord progression. I based my melody on theirs (although eventually it took it's own turns as the song found itself) and took note of their lyrical structure, which was a series of four rhyme couplets in each verse. I began the song not knowing where I was going, sort of like the characters that emerged out of the story.
I could not place myself in the exact character the Felice Brothers were singing about, for she was distant and unatainable. I could not take her out of the place they had created for her, which was as set as a photograph. But the sentiment- the feeling of far away, of longing, perhaps regret- this stayed with me. And since the character singing in their song is a man who seems to be roaming far away, it gave me the feeling being a woman on the other end of that, of singing to a man who is always equally as unnatainable in his own right. One who will always belong to the world, and never to you, try as you may.

The Lyrics are as follows:

Well if you look further west
To the orange and reds
Where the tree trunks have grown
Out of nothing but stone
That's where my love resides
In the black candlelight
In the fall of our death
When the world went to rest.

Well you picked up a stone
Said "see this is my home.
I'm a man of the wild
I'm forever a child."
"I can't be with no one
Who don't carry a gun."
"I live for the eyes
Of the one I won't find.

Oh lie de lie lie
Oh lord I did lie
With my boots strapped on
I made a grown man cry
Cause I became him
And he became me
And it grew hard to tell
Well who's heart had failed.

So if you look further west
Where the sun goes to rest
Out where the wind blows
Over nothing but stone
That's where my love was born
On one clear cold morn
That's where my love died
As you turned your eyes.

©2009 Maya Solovey