This is a song about 'lateral drift' and how essential it often is to discovering why you've been put on this earth. Van was 15–18 in Belfast when he started a window cleaning service with his friends while playing sax on the weekends. Music was one of his many discoveries back then, along with Zen, Beatnik writers, American Blues, and (presumably) girls. He was a creative sponge, soaking up all these influences while also taking pride in simple manual labor. He offered no apologies for any of this, and shortly after his window cleaning period, music coalesced as his life's focus when he became the frontman for the band Them. But he never forgot his sax, his Zen/mystic studies, the Beat era, or his time as a simple, honest working man... those all made him the multi-faceted man we know.
This is a song about 'lateral drift' and how essential it often is to discovering why you've been put on this earth. Van was 15–18 in Belfast when he started a window cleaning service with his friends while playing sax on the weekends. Music was one of his many discoveries back then, along with Zen, Beatnik writers, American Blues, and (presumably) girls. He was a creative sponge, soaking up all these influences while also taking pride in simple manual labor. He offered no apologies for any of this, and shortly after his window cleaning period, music coalesced as his life's focus when he became the frontman for the band Them. But he never forgot his sax, his Zen/mystic studies, the Beat era, or his time as a simple, honest working man... those all made him the multi-faceted man we know.