Story
How many windows have we looked out of, thinking that the grass is always greener somewhere else, the people a little more beautiful, events more glittering? How many fears that your sweetie is seeing the glimpse of a life that the two of you don’t share? Wonders and thrills you can’t provide?
We live on a farm in northern Wisconsin, a real do-it-yourselfer place that doesn’t fit any code of construction anywhere, a veteran of countless storms, snows and sleets. Drafty and sweet, well past the point of new. Home sweet home to us, home to a life more full than I knew could ever be.
We are musicians, and have a duo called Chance, and we’ve been together making music for 24 years. We have sort of melted into each other by now, kind of like when you start looking like your pets!
For the first time in those 24 years, Ed went away to perform in an extended tour with another act. It was certainly a high level and exciting show, one that in my fears he would consider superior to our own. Certain that I would lose him to it and to its distractions, I looked out the window often here and in retrospect, sure could have used a cat to keep me company!.
This time period inspired a song called “You are Paris“. This is on our album called “Poor Farm Road“, a portrait of our life here in Wisconsin.
This piece was written in the spirit of the music inspired by World War One, where the streets of Paris were teeming with flower carts and jugglers and Mimes and joy, singing and dancing and being fashionable in the streets and cafes. This part of our world’s history contained many scenes of tearful goodbyes at railway stations, dusty places in the South where men had never seen anywhere but their little town and a handful of friends and neighbors, and then they answered the call to go over the big sea to fight for it. War time has always yielded wonderful art and music. It’s somewhat peculiar and interesting that such horror does make that happen…
There was a song that Ed’s parents had sung to each other way back when about looking at the moon and wondering about where the other one was, what they were doing, what they were seeing… In our writing process, we also used the key idea from another old song (“How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, after they‘ve seen Paris?”)
Love is indivisible from pain, fullness indivisible from emptiness, searching from finding. This song speaks of separation and love across the continents. We hope that you will enjoy this lyric born of my long lonely night. - Cheryl, written for the book "Love Stories from the Bay" - Ros Nelson publisher
