Theme
2:23am October 27, 2014
Lyrics below, bolded parts are how I feel about Redwood Terrace.  Another Kathy Mattea song about exile. She doesn’t write most of these songs, but she makes them her own.  She completely makes them her own, and she makes them go together in a way where I’d thought she’d written them all to go together.

clatterbane:  If you’re looking into her work, I’d strongly suggest the album “Calling Me Home”, which this song is from, and which I consider my favorite of her albums, and I own most of her albums.  In fact it may be my favorite album, period, at the moment.  After that album, I’d say “Coal” is a really good second best.  Her grandparents were miners and she put together an entire album of songs about coal mining.  I made a playlist out of those two albums and I generally put it on infinite repeat and shuffle.  There’s one song they have in common but the rest are different.  "Calling Me Home" is really speaking to me right now, because every song on it is about loss and grief – of people, of places, of ways of life, of clean water and land – and many are also about exile, or about choosing to leave and regretting it no matter how good one’s reasons.  I know I can never go back to Redwood Terrace, not to live, and just knowing that others feel the same way does me a lot of good.  The amazing thing, to me, is that these songs are about terrible things, yet they are beautiful songs, and she makes you see the beauty that’s still in the world even at the darkest of times.  Also that line about slipping away like a bird in flight… that’s exactly what I do, many nights, to get back to the redwoods, it’s like I can just sort of fly myself there in my mind.

Anyway on to the lyrics:

West Virginia, oh, my home, 
West Virginia’s where I belong, 
In the dead of the night, in the still and the quiet 
I slip away like a bird in flight, 
Back to those hills, the place that I call home. 

 It’s been years now since I left it, 
And this city life’s about got the best of me, 
I can’t remember why I left so free, 
What I wanted to do, what I wanted to see, 
But I can sure remember where I came from. 

 West Virginia, oh, my home, 
West Virginia’s where I belong, 
In the dead of the night, in the still and the quiet 
I slip away like a bird in flight, 
Back to those hills, the place that I call home. 

 Well, I paid the price for the leaving, 
And this life I have is not the one I thought I’d find. 
Just let me live, love, let me cry 
But when I go, just let me die 
Among the friends who’ll remember when I’m gone. 

West Virginia, oh, my home, 
West Virginia’s where I belong, 
In the dead of the night, in the still and the quiet 
I slip away like a bird in flight, 
Back to those hills, the place that I call home. 

Home, home, home, 
Oh, I can see it’s all here in my mind. 
Home, home, home, 
I can almost smell the honey suckle vines. 

 In the dead of the night, in the still and the quiet 
I slip away like a bird in flight, 
Back to those hills, the place that I call home. 

In the dead of the night, in the still and the quiet 
I slip away like a bird in flight, 
Back to those hills, the place that I call home. 
Notes:
  1. withasmoothroundstone posted this