When the Winds Break
The winds of change, the trappings of circumstance
Back to the folk tales we go. This song is from the album that contains Along the Way and Our Intermittent Life.
Ready for life, and she’s said this before, When the winds break, She will break out the door. Cokes on the top shelf, water below, She’s barely awake For the first winter’s snow. The windows are open, the orders are in, She’s money to spend And a life to begin. Dust off the table and into the corner, The wind’s not her friend, Maybe it can transform her. "I won’t be a number, I will be known. I'll be a breeze, and blow myself home. I am the Gulf Stream, my own milestone, I will discover my Rosetta bones." She’s ready for life, and she’s said this before, When the winds break, She will break out the door. Red plastic chairs and soup of the day, She burns at the steak With her laminate play. The knives are clean, the ice cream floats, She eyes the clock, They compare discount quotes. The greasy air thins as she walks down the street, The rain clouds are heavy, And she’s out on her feet. "I won’t be a number, I will be known. I'll be a breeze, and blow myself home. I am the Gulf Stream, my own milestone, I will discover my Rosetta bones." The night’s too long, but the day’s not too short, The kitchen is dark, And it’s cold as a morgue. She’s said this for sure — she knows talk is cheap — But when it rains, it pours, And it's warm in her sheets. There are brakes on the window and brakes on the door, When the bow bends, She’ll still have the store. She turns to the wind and says, Where will you be? I’ll wait here for you if you wait here for me. She turns to the wind and says, Where will you be? I’ll wait here for you if you wait here for me.
I’m not sure when I wrote this song, but probably around 2015 or so. There are files called When the Winds Break littered around my computer. At one point, this song was a weird dystopian techno thing. These weren’t versions of what exists now but entirely different pieces of music. This particular instance is from March 2022.
The song is about faded dreams and the passing of time. In the choruses, I use one of my favourite devices: singing in the first person but from the perspective of a character. In this case, the character I sing about in the verses. The chorus is like a mantra she repeats to herself, and it’s both true (no one is just a number) and, by the end of the song, false. She’s right where she started.
The arrangement reflects this. It’s pretty unrelenting — there are no breaks between sections until after the bridge. I’m sure we’ve all had days where we’re like, “fuck, I have to do all this shit again?!”
The music all runs through long chains of audio effects which make the sound swirl and swoosh like the wind. All the elements are processed together so they become a mass of breathing sound. There’s at times a claustrophobic intimacy to the processing here, much like the character’s life. Rather than spatial effects being used to make the soundscape expansive, epic, or dreamlike, here they bring things forward and back like the push and pull of hopes vs reality.
Although the song ends with the character seemingly stuck, waiting forever on the winds of life to change, I don’t think of this as a criticism of her. Circumstance has a much bigger influence on our lives than anything else — what people used to call fortune. There’s a coziness and warmth to the final verse which suggests she’s not really to blame for having failed to transform her life or discover her truest self. The American dream is a myth, after all.