Pilgrim of the Great Return
from If I Could Live Long Enough by Tobin Mueller
There is no place left to go to
I can call my Holy Land
‘less it brings a piece of childhood
and a memory I can hand to my lover.
To you, my lover.
Don’t take me far away;
I’m only here to stay
A Pilgrim of the Great Return.
When you change the way you look at things,
all the things you look at change.
Every time I come to return,
I arrive for the first time, again.
Where’s a pilgrim left to go to
‘cept for deep inside himself?
I’ve wandered through Jerusalem
where blood and stone collide,
been half way round the universe
and still I’d rather lie
with my lover.
With you, my lover.
When you change the way you look at things,
all the things you look at change.
Every time I come to return,
I arrive for the first time, again.
Again. Again. First time, again.
©2004 Tobin Mueller
This is the song I most wanted to share, the main reason I released the album. It marks the first time I wrote a song specifically for saxophonist Woody Mankowski. Woody would turn into my favorite collaborator over the next decade (2004-2015). We subsequently wrote fifteen tunes together, including most of the tracks on The Muller's Wheel and half of the tunes on Come In Funky. Yes, Woody had previously played on Rain Bather, but I'd never written specifically for him before Pilgrim Of The Great Return. His soprano sax transform the recording. Kudos also go to my son, Anton, and his simple acoustic groove overdubbed several times to fill out the sound. (Anton also sings and plays on my progressive rock album, Audiocracy: Revolution's Son.) And bassist Thor Oliverson (a wonderful talent from Norway who also played bass on My Heart Still Beats, a haunting track from my 2007 album A Bit Of Light) adds a very cool line that changes the feel of many of the chords above it. The chemistry built between all of these players by the end of the tune is wonderful. Pilgrim Of The Great Return was supposed to go on A Bit Of Light, but we simply ran out of space. I am very happy to finally release the song, even if it is 10 years after we recorded it.
The process went like this: First, my son Anton and I developed the rhythm guitar chord progression together. Then Woody Mankowski recorded his sax in the studio, which I later cut and pasted in order to combine several takes that became the countermelodies in the fade out. Finally, Thor Oliverson added in his bass. I tried to do something different with this song than what you hear in most folk tunes, writing in 6/8 and using a harmonically minor-modal chorus... so that the real ease and relaxation of the song plays out in the verses (which is the 2-chord groove). The idea was to create tension in the chorus (those repeated moments of stress in our lives) that spill out into the longer term daily portions of life (the verses), creating a sense of return to daily constancy and grounded memories. The song was written as a personal counter-balance to the sadness I felt when writing my 9/11 series of songs (Was There Once A Time, etc.) Instead of identifying a "New Holy Land" outside myself, I found it within, with the help of my wife, Suzanne.
* Artwork by Vladimir Kush
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