Calaveras: Music

• MP3 short clip, hi-fi play (broadband)
• MP3 short clip, lo-fi play (modem)

Like a lot of my songs about the futile quest, this one was inspired by my father, who was a raw artistic talent, capable drummer and affable but insecure salesman destroyed by the same unsettling voices that keep driving me to be or do something more.

Don Quixote


In ‘63 a Soho gallery showed your work
Twisted forms in charcoal and some abstract oils
For thirty more year you kept on tending those fields
of your single minded tortured toils
Made enough to keep you off the streets
and I knew you as a cranky intellectual
who argued with the world about the trivial
With a passion that made it seem so essential

How did you ride that white steed so high in the face of the rushing tide
Truth so elusive even you could barely see
Don Quixote did you ever find what you believe?

And I am standing here in front of dwindling crowds
Singing what I remember as Gods own truth
My voice seems the weakest when it cries out loud
To romantics seeking love songs about happy youth
So here’s to the heroes in the undertow
The fighters for enlightenment we’ll never know

Truth so elusive even you could barely see
Don Quixote did you ever find what you believe?

And did death bring you truth or only peace
A glorious light or just release

How did you ride that white steed so high in the face of the rushing tide
Truth so elusive even you could barely see
Don Quixote did you ever find what you believe