When You Said Goodbye (live)

*Recorded live from a performance at the Darnall Ampitheater, College of St. Benedict, St. Joseph, MN September 2, 2009

Rachel Holder and George

I've saved the narrative behind When You Said Goodbye, the most recently written song on Songs From the Wayward Journey, for last, as it is the one that is the most personal to me of all contained herein. It's also the last kind of song I thought I would ever be writing about: that annoyingly epic, but unfortunately necessary "sad farewell" song.

Have you ever been in a love relationship that was rolling merrily along, full of friendship, good times, long walks, trips to foreign lands, sharing of stories and adventure, improvised moments of hilarity, and found it was becoming one of those "wow, this feels right, this person is COOL and I want to get to know this person even MORE" kind of relationships? And then, just as its really clicking...the other person finds they have to move away. Far away. Most likely for good. And you can't follow. And so, you come to that moment where you are saying "good bye" to them for the last time. It sucks, right? But you are also lucky because you have had such a good friendship up to that point that you both aren't really saying "goodbye" for good, are you? Sad goodbyes aren't that heavy when you know you will be staying in touch, especially if the friendship was built on a strong foundation.

That's where I found myself this past summer. Sad to say goodbye to a lover-now-turned-good-friend, but intensely looking forward to a long-planned road trip a month later to Denver and Aspen (a 14 hour drive of over 900 miles) and to a long-anticipated reunion of friends.

Well, to quote Jim Payne's lyrics in All the Time, "it wasn't the fairy-tale I expected." Upon arrival, I found myself suddenly and without explanation facing a wall of silence from my friend, who had decided not to see me, after all. I didn't see it coming, and to make it even worse, I was not given one reason as to "why?" It threw me for the most surprising, depressing loop I have ever had thrown at me. Ever. Yet, ironically, this happening to me became the core impetus behind the entire Songs From the Wayward Journey project.

You have already heard the lyric mastery of Jim Payne in two songs on this CD; You Don't See Me and All the Time. After coming home, confused and numb from that long fruitless journey, I shared with Jim what had happened. For me, it was a chance to begin the process of dealing with it and find a way to make some sense of it. For Jim, it became the impetus make sense of the story by writing lyrics. A few days later, Jim emailed me the words for When You Said Goodbye, and, immediately captivated, I stayed up all night composing the music. By 5:30am, I sent a rough version of the song to Jim, who was amazed to see it in his email inbox that morning, only hours after he had sent me the words.

The writing of this song serves to remind me why I do what I do when I am called to be an artist. As my favorite poet Rilke says "For the sake of a single poem, you must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming." In other words, you have to live life in order to truly write about it. Or better yet, as Rilke says in another one of his Sonnets to Orpheus, "if your drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine." It was with this action that I had to let go of When You Said Goodbye, let go of my friend and let it be. Like the poet Orpheus, who lightly comes and goes and and who can only stay a few days longer than a rose, even at the moment I had written the song, even as I had transformed sadness, loss, confusion into another form, I knew it was no longer mine to hold onto. It was time to move on.

ChairsAs I set this song in a drawer alongside many of the other then-unreleased songs you now find on this CD, I took a look at just how many had actually gathered there over time, waiting to be heard, to be strung together "like beads on a necklace" to quote fellow composer Roberta Carlson. When You Said Goodbye was the catalyst. "Huh," I said to myself. "There's enough material here to release a CD!" Each of these songs represents differing types of journeys, through the heart, through time, through the movement of bodies across timeless stages. These were to become the Songs From the Wayward Journey. And the rest, as they say, is history.

For Matty