#upperfields

premiere: Upperfields - Runner

Alt-folker Shaun Gould sent me this story: 

Dear Mark,

Bear with me, in something of a round about way, I’m gonna tell you about the song, “Runner”, my band, Upperfields, has just finished. We haven't shared it with any one else. If you like it, we hope you will premiere it for us. 

When I was 15 I got burned badly enough that I was in the hospital for two weeks and I was on morphine for a period of the time. There I had some of the most vivid dreams I’ve ever had. I remember one of them because, in one form or another, it has reoccured again and again: It’s the future, it’s a strange, alien world locked in a totalitarian regime of cynical oligarchs. I’ve been wrongly convicted and sent to a labor camp in the desert. I knock down a brutal, alien guard and run through a baked-earth field laced with barbed wire. Miraculously I zig and zag through the snares and into a cool and shaded pine forest. I don’t stop running. The soft floor of needles springs me on and silences my footfalls.  

The song doesn’t follow that story exactly but it comes from those dreams. It’s someone looking out of their confinement and longing for the free and sacred woods past the fence. He is so fed up with his present state, he is almost ready to go. He’s dreaming about it during the day. 

I used to worry that these dreams of escape suggested something cowardly and unproductive in me. But in writing this song I’ve been able to clarify my thinking here. Escape in many situations is the first brave act we must make. Instead of being cowed with our certain and present unhappiness, we embrace the hope of the unknown and launch into it. Any eventual creation we put our hands to starts with escape because we need first to leave the old, oppressive place to find a new, fresh space to create in. And many times that old place has its claws in us pretty deep so there is risk and pain involved in getting free. We have to be brave. 

In real life, it’s usually more subtle than a jail-break into the hinterlands. But some situations are so irredeemably bad for our spirits that they beg a reaction this drastic. The wisdom of running appears clearly to us then. To quote Explosions In The Sky, ‘the earth is not a cold, dead place’. There will always be somewhere worth running to, just as there was in that first dream in the end. The scene is still very vivid to me: We runaways, now turned rebels, are eating dinner together in a house built high up in a massive tree overlooking the ocean. Our faces are bright among many candles, and our joy and love for each other is clear, having been fortified many times. We have gone beyond escape, we have found our free space, and we use it unselfishly. We plan another mission to free our fellows left behind.  

Here is a video we did. It's shot by Koof Umoren for his series Random Tea Room Sessions, check em all out here, they're really cool. Thanks for listening, and thanks for the great blog you’ve built. 

Shaun Gould

This is really, really awesome. So awesome that it deserves a promo.

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