This song is beautiful. I cry almost every time I hear it.
It was written about Chet Baker, the infamous trumpet player who happened to be a heroin addict.
The contrast of beautiful, innocent images like "morning song birds" and "flowers toward the Sun" with the heavy and dark theme of addiction is
what makes this song so haunting.
Clearly this song is sung from Chet's perspective. I always see the "lifeboat" as a very unreliable metaphor for heroin. I think that to Chet, the heroin must have seemed like the lifeboat, keeping him afloat at times, but as an observer I think it's apparent that the heroin is actually the rising water that pulls him under.
I'm not a heroin user but I've heard that the feeling it gives you is akin to what it feels like to drift around aimlessly in a swimming pool or on a large body of water. In the movie "Ray" there is a water motif that escalates with his heroin addiction. And heroin itself is often injected as a liquid through a syringe.
I sometimes think that all of those connections to the water may explain the flood imagery.
I took the "scrawled" page as a suicide note--Chet's swan song.
Couldn't have said it better myself. For those of us "of a certain age" who remember Chet as a young, hip, West Coast jazz icon, the later twists and turns of his life are a haunting reminder that all glory is, indeed, fleeting. King Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke, Ziggy Elman, Tommy Dorsey, Charlie Parker, Jim Morrison...the list of gifted musicians whose demons took them from us too soon is depressingly long. Thanks for posting such a cogent interpretation of David Wilcox's masterpiece.
Couldn't have said it better myself. For those of us "of a certain age" who remember Chet as a young, hip, West Coast jazz icon, the later twists and turns of his life are a haunting reminder that all glory is, indeed, fleeting. King Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke, Ziggy Elman, Tommy Dorsey, Charlie Parker, Jim Morrison...the list of gifted musicians whose demons took them from us too soon is depressingly long. Thanks for posting such a cogent interpretation of David Wilcox's masterpiece.
This song is beautiful. I cry almost every time I hear it.
It was written about Chet Baker, the infamous trumpet player who happened to be a heroin addict.
The contrast of beautiful, innocent images like "morning song birds" and "flowers toward the Sun" with the heavy and dark theme of addiction is what makes this song so haunting.
Clearly this song is sung from Chet's perspective. I always see the "lifeboat" as a very unreliable metaphor for heroin. I think that to Chet, the heroin must have seemed like the lifeboat, keeping him afloat at times, but as an observer I think it's apparent that the heroin is actually the rising water that pulls him under.
I'm not a heroin user but I've heard that the feeling it gives you is akin to what it feels like to drift around aimlessly in a swimming pool or on a large body of water. In the movie "Ray" there is a water motif that escalates with his heroin addiction. And heroin itself is often injected as a liquid through a syringe.
I sometimes think that all of those connections to the water may explain the flood imagery.
I took the "scrawled" page as a suicide note--Chet's swan song.
Couldn't have said it better myself. For those of us "of a certain age" who remember Chet as a young, hip, West Coast jazz icon, the later twists and turns of his life are a haunting reminder that all glory is, indeed, fleeting. King Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke, Ziggy Elman, Tommy Dorsey, Charlie Parker, Jim Morrison...the list of gifted musicians whose demons took them from us too soon is depressingly long. Thanks for posting such a cogent interpretation of David Wilcox's masterpiece.
Couldn't have said it better myself. For those of us "of a certain age" who remember Chet as a young, hip, West Coast jazz icon, the later twists and turns of his life are a haunting reminder that all glory is, indeed, fleeting. King Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke, Ziggy Elman, Tommy Dorsey, Charlie Parker, Jim Morrison...the list of gifted musicians whose demons took them from us too soon is depressingly long. Thanks for posting such a cogent interpretation of David Wilcox's masterpiece.