Life by the Drop

Sometimes music is moving and inspiring even when I don’t get it. A song can strike me at some particular moment of my life or resonate with a given circumstance until it sinks into my mind, and I stop trying to figure out what it means. From time to time the question sort of nags me – what are they really talking about?

Having been accused enough times (appropriately) of overthinking things, I’ve got a guilty streak for even wanting to know the back story of a song. So eventually I stop asking the question and enjoy the music for the sound and associations it brings.

I listened to Stevie Ray Vaughan from the start of highschool, grooving to poppy radio hits like the radio friendly Hard to Be, sung with his brother Jimmie, or staring into eternity while soaking in the quiet yet piercing blues of Tin Pan Alley.  

But none of his music struck me like Life by the Drop, the two-and-a-half minute solo voice and twelve-string acoustic guitar number that appears as the last track on The Sky is Crying album released in 1991, a year after SRV’s death. I sang and hummed it for more than 20 years without trying to find out who or what inspired it.

Up and down that road in our worn out shoes,

talkin' 'bout good things and singin' the blues

You went your way, I stayed behind

We both knew it was just a matter of time

Few songs use so little to say so much. And few songs invoke such genuine melancholy with just a voice and a guitar. The basic theme is obvious enough - two friends separated for years are happy to be reunited; only the singer has evidently not done nearly as well as his long-lost pal. One went off to find fame and fortune, while the other stayed behind. And it’s an obvious anthem to living life to the fullest, which just about anyone can relate to. But something was missing from the plot – how did Stevie Ray get left behind, and who was he singing to?

Back in the early 1990s you usually stuffed away questions about what a singer actually meant, or at best mused aloud about them, only to have someone in the room tell you to shut up and listen to the music. There wasn’t any Googling to be done.

I remember listening to Life by the Drop in my grandmother’s cold house in Cooperstown at Christmas, and singing it with my older brother Eric as we backpacked in the White Mountains in New Hampshire. I remember it getting an approving nod from my Dad when we put it on in the car, giving him a welcome respite from hours of punk rock. Few songs remind me so much of the bonds I formed with Eric when we were teenagers, then college students, then grudgingly full-grown adults – and to this day best of friends like the two guys in this song.

Tonight I came back from a run feeling like I wanted to hear it, and shortly thereafter felt like I wanted to Google it, knowing that most quests for deeper meaning in pop music start out a search for mystery and end up crashing into incoherence.

I was happy to discover the song had as much meaning for Stevie Ray as it does for me.

And I was happy to see that the obvious interpretation -- that it was about him ditching the alcoholism and drug addiction that plagued most of his career – is wrong.

Turns out the song was actually written by another blues singer named Doyle Bramhall, a close collaborator of Stevie Ray and Jimmie’s who helped them write songs but stayed quietly in the shadows while SRV lived in the fast lane. Cribbing generously from a Capuchin friar blogger who four years ago dedicated a post to this very issue:

Helping to write songs and music for Stevie Ray and his brother Jimmy Vaughan, Doyle would not put out his own album until after Stevie's death in 1990. It wasn't until after his death that Doyle even heard the recording of his song.

SRV had covered a song that someone else had written about him, a friend who was proud of Stevie Ray’s success and fame yet nostalgic about not having reached it himself. Stevie Ray went through rehab and narrowly escaped having his substance problem kill him, only to die four years later in a tragic helicopter accident.

In the end the song has little to do with the things I associate it with, but just knowing it has a story behind it makes it, for whatever incoherent reasons, all the more significant for me.