ben wakeman : : Journal

Will it Ever Stop Raining?

July 2, 2004

It's been raining for weeks. I don't think we have had a single day of complete sunshine and it's starting to get to me. Last night I had a horrible dream, inspired I know by recently seeing Farenheit 9/11. I dreamed that the war was still on, the draft had been reinstated. The government had appointed a person from each neighborhood in our county to gather up all of the elegible children and to divide them evenly into two groups. One group was to be shipped out immediately while the other group would remain. This person was not allowed to know which group was which. In the dream, this person was me. It was such an agonizing feeling -- I remember looking at my two boys and struggling with what to do because there was no way out for any of us. At the end of the dream I put them both in the same group, because I knew of no other way. I woke up before I found out which group was being sent to war.

Tom and I had a marathon practice last night, going over a lot of old songs we have not touched in months, even years in some cases. It was good to dust a few of them off and rediscover some of the magic still hiding between some of the chord changes. We are preparing for this gig tomorrow down in Zebulon Georgia --- it's a small town 4th of July celebration and we will all be bringing our families.

I finished up a preliminary recording of a song I wrote back in the Spring called Walk Away. The song was inspired by the book Cold Mountain and the war in Iraq. I'm pretty happy with the sound of the recording, but am still not sure if the performance delivers the song. You can judge for yourself by downloading the MP3 here.