Brian Hamilton

Song and Story: Remorse

Good songwriters make the best short-storytellers, finding whole novels in the briefest moment of memory or worry or hope. Patty Griffin is a good songwriter. She writes flawlessly in this song, “Long Ride Home,” but the words are incomplete without hearing, for example, her initial mournful resignation (every line drops at the end, unlike all the other verses) that gives way to a pathos driven by frustration. A persistent but unpredictable riff punctuates the otherwise low and plodding chord progression: the bursts of (sometimes angry, sometimes undirected) energy from one who is mourning. It ends with an inexplicable and perhaps inadvertent lightness, but maybe it only means to release the same structure into repetition.

Long black limousine
Shiniest car I’ve ever seen
Back seat is nice and clean
She rides as quiet as a dream

Someone dug a hole six long feet in the ground
I said goodbye to you and I threw my roses down
Ain’t nothing left at all in the end of being proud
With me riding in this car, and you flying through them clouds

And I’ve had some time to think about that
And watch the sun sink like a stone
I’ve had some time to think about you
On the long ride home

One day I took your tiny hand
Put your finger in the wedding band
Your daddy gave a piece of land
We laid ourselves the best of plans

Forty years go by with someone laying in your bed
Forty years of things you say you wish you’d never said
How hard would it have been to say some kinder words instead
I wonder as I stare up at the sky a-turning red.

I’ve had some time to think about that
And watch the sun sink like a stone
I’ve had some time to think about you
On the long ride home

Headlights searching down the driveway
The house is dark as it can be
I go inside and all is silent
It seems as empty as the inside of me

And I’ve had some time to think about that
And watch the sun sink like a stone
I’ve had some time to think about you
On the long ride home

(Patty Griffin, “Long Ride Home” on 1000 Kisses)

3 January 2007 |
tags: Music