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[av_heading heading=’JUST ANOTHER DAY ‘ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=’30’ subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=”]
BY LUIS BUENAFLOR JR.
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Friday. September 15, 2017
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I’m sitting in the railway station
Got a ticket to my destination
On a tour of one-night stands my suitcase and guitar in hand
And every stop is neatly planned for a poet and a one-man band
Homeward bound
I wish I was
Home where my thought’s escaping
Home where my music’s playing
Home where my love lies waiting
Silently for me
Every day’s an endless stream
Of cigarettes and magazines
And each town looks the same to me the movies and the factories
And every stranger’s face I see reminds me that I long to be
Homeward bound
I wish I was
Home where my thought’s escaping
Home where my music’s playing
Home where my love lies waiting
Silently for me
Tonight I’ll sing my songs again
I’ll play the game and pretend
But all my words come back to me in shades of mediocrity
Like emptiness in harmony I need someone to comfort me
Homeward bound
I wish I was
Home where my thought’s escaping
Home where my music’s playing
Home where my love lies waiting
Silently for me
— words and music by Paul Simon
IT’S FRIDAY and as usual we take a break from politics and talk about the more pleasant, sometimes sentimental things in life.
Love, passion, longing for a loved one or days gone by is what makes us human. After all, we are sentient beings with the ability to feel pain or pleasure and what it is to be loved.
Yes despite the seemingly indifferent exterior, this aging hippie is a sentimental old fool who has loved and lost and loved again. Sometimes music reflects that moment or experience that makes us long for home and that loved one, and that’s what we’re talking about today.
From that free online encyclopedia:
“Homeward Bound” is a song by American music duo Simon & Garfunkel written by Paul Simon and produced by Bob Johnston. The song was released as a single on Jan. 19, 1966 by Columbia Records
“Homeward Bound” was written by Paul Simon after returning to England in the spring of 1964. He had previously spent time in Essex, and he became a nightly fixture at the Railway Hotel in Brentwood, beginning that April. He was reeling from his brief period in the Greenwich Village folk scene, as well as the recording of his first album with Art Garfunkel, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.,
Once the recording of Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. had been completed, Paul Simon travelled to England to explore the London folk scene. While there, he met Kathy Chitty (the same Kathy from “Kathy’s Song” and “America”), who later became his girlfriend. After a performance in Liverpool he wrote about how he missed her and his home.
Simon was at Widnes railway station, waiting for the early morning milk train to London. He had been missing Chitty’s company and he began to write “Homeward Bound” on a scrap of paper.
Although there are no definite statements as to where the song was written, and critics have argued over it, but the Widnes railway station displays a plaque on the wall of the Liverpool-bound waiting room claiming it as the place where it happened. Sadly, the plaque has been stolen from time to time.
Here’s what Paul Simon said in a 1990 interview with SongTalk:
“Homeward Bound was written in Liverpool when I was travelling. What I like about that is that it has a very clear memory of Liverpool station and the streets of Liverpool and the club I played at and me at age 22. It’s like a snapshot, a photograph of a long time ago. I like that about it but I don’t like the song that much. First of all, it’s not an original title. That’s one of the main problems with it. It’s been around forever. No, the early songs I can’t say I really like them. But there’s something naive and sweet-natured and I must say I like that about it. They’re not angry. And that means that I wasn’t angry or unhappy. And that’s my memory of that time: it was just about idyllic. It was just the best time of my life, I think, up until recently, these last five years or so, six years… This has been the best time of my life. But before that, I would say that that was.”
Perhaps these lines best express what moi feels at that moment and the longing that goes with it: “Like emptiness in harmony I need someone to comfort me, homeward bound I wish I was.” (brotherlouie16@gmail.com/PN)
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