The Truck in Cold Lake

I once heard someone say that the whole of Western literature could be reduced to two themes: "Man Goes on Journey" and "Stranger Comes to Town." This one would be “Kansas Farm Girl Goes on Journey” but it also includes a tornado, FEMA money, tracking down a mother who abandoned her family and, in the end, a homicide. As with most of my songs, this one is dark. Then again, when I was a kid, lots of things in “The Wizard of Oz” scared me. But this song is the “Oz” story: Dorothy goes on a journey, learns from the people she meets, is confronted by evil, applies the knowledge she's gained when fighting evil, then overcomes evil. Baum’s Dorothy killed the Wicked Witch of the West by throwing water on her. My Dorothy simply drowns her by rolling her truck into a lake. A couple of songwriting notes: 1) I wrote this song in about 20 minutes while sitting in a courtroom waiting for a bail hearing to begin in a murder case. But songwriting is not just about writing; it's also about editing. I spent a couple of hours editing it and cutting out every word that didn't contribute to the story. 2) Speaking of "Cutting out every word that didn't contribute to the story," maybe I’ll get kicked out of the "Songs From Scratch" project for breaking the rules, but this song does not contain the words “namaste” and “nostrums.” There aren’t too many rules to songwriting, but one of the rules is “Don’t use words like ‘namaste’ and ‘nostrum’ in a song.” In the context of this song, they’re dumb words. Unless the song is about Hinduism (which “The Wizard of Oz” isn’t) then they are wasted. I don’t know if Levy was trying to be cute or was just being a jerk. Maybe both. Songwriting is about clear storytelling, and neither the narrator nor the character of my song would use either of those words. I don't know many other songwriters who would use them either. Can you imagine Townes Van Zandt using "namaste" and "nostrums" -- and within two lines of each other in the same song, no less? Think Guy Clark would try it? Neil Young? Al Stewart, maybe. Words like that would just confuse the listener and obfuscate the story. I'm willing to bet that 95 percent of the listeners don’t have a clue what either of them mean. I know MPR listeners are generally a cut above and a bit smarter, but still.... When the whole "Songs From Scratch" thing is over, I will go back and completely re-do those lines so the song is entirely original. And more sensible, hopefully. 3) I didn't use Levy's lines all together. Two of his lines are in the second verse, while two of them are in the last verse. The four lines, taken together, didn't really strike me as the type of linear storytelling I needed for the song.