“There’s a price for being free”
This week’s Song Lyric Sunday has a clear nautical theme, but that’s no excuse just to roll out Rod Stewart’s ‘Sailing’ and be done with it.
No apologies for featuring the Grateful Dead again, and this is another collaboration between John Barlow and Bob Weir. When played live, this was almost without exception seamlessly followed by the much more upbeat ‘Saint of Circumstance’, which happened also to be the track that immediately followed it on the 1980 studio album ‘Go To Heaven’.
Compass card is spinning
Helm is swingin’ to and fro
Ooh, where’s the dog star?
Ooh, where’s the moon?
You’re a lost sailor
You’ve been too long at sea
Some days the gales are howling
Some days the sea is still as glass
Ooh, reef the main sail
Ooh, lash the mast
You’re a lost sailor
You’ve been too long at sea
Now the shore lights beckon
Yeah there’s a price for being free
Yeah the sea birds cry
There’s a ghost wind blowin’
It’s calling you, to that misty swirling sea
‘Til the chains of your dreams are broken
No place in this world you can be
You’re a lost sailor
You’ve been way too long at sea
Now the shore lights beckon
Yeah there’s a price for being free
Drifting yeah drifting
Yeah drifting and dreaming
‘Cause there’s a place you’ve never been
Maybe a place you’ve never seen
You can hear her calling on the wind
Go on and drift your life away
Yeah just drifting and dreaming
Maybe drift your life away
Drifting and dreaming
Written by John Barlow and Bob Weir
Not really a fan of the Dead but this is a good one.
Nice choice, Deadhead and this is one of the very few Grateful Dead songs that I have not yet wrote a post about. This song captures the universal feeling of wandering, searching for a horizon, or navigating personal life transitions and self-discovery. ‘Lost Sailor’ made its live debut on August 4, 1979, at the Oakland Auditorium Arena, which was the exact same night Garcia first unveiled and played his newly acquired Tiger guitar.