CLICK TO LISTEN TO SONG ABOVE
You can call it dream, you can call it active imagination. (If interested in what that is look up Carl Jung.) It is simply just letting images and imagination “Show” you what they will. Like watching a movie in your own mind. In the right centered state it becomes very dream like and surprising as your unconscious brings up images. I love to write songs in this way although there are many ways to write songs.
This Song is inspired by many found objects, dreams, synchronicity and or coincidences if you prefer. It started with hearing a small young neighborhood boy calling for his friends on his doorstep. It was twilight and they had already gone into their homes for the night but he kept calling to them to come out and play. I knew nobody would be returning his calls.. As I looked out the window at a red twilight sky, I began playing chords on my old acoustic Guitar. I stood in a darkened kitchen with a window overlooking a darkening red twilight. Rocking and Swaying in time to the beat, eyes closed, I began to follow the music rather than lead it.
I let the images lead me and saw many images. Thoughts like dreams appeared My minds eye could see someone driving through a desert at twilight,the wheels were crackling on the dusty gravel as a well worn black car came to a stop at a desert gas station. This person got out of the car and made there way to an old payphone. They had traveled far. This call was an important one.
Eventually they reached the payphone and saw the shiny reflection of the chrome. They reached into their pocket and put a coin in the phone.
Waiting, waiting, ringing, ringing for a long, long time. No one was answering.
A long wait, that seemed like a lifetime and they had had enough, no one was answering and I saw the person just lean their head on the phone booth.
There was a quiet still moment.
The person is making a phone call to .. someone that matters, someone they care very much about. Who is that someone on the other end of the line. A lover perhaps? Or is It a spiritual call / metaphor. A call to something higher, a higher power if you will, a plea for the spirit to fall. A call for connection, renewal, empowerment.
Later when I put the guitar down and opened my eyes again i realized I was an onlooker, peering into another world. There was more to this story.
Later i was on the internet, I was trying to get onto a site and had to type in a password. We all know about those scrambled code words to get into a site.
They want to make sure your not a robot so they give you these random words to decipher and type into the box. It was A Craigslist scrambled word and it was randomly “Kerosene Quarter”. A-haa I thought, there’s another piece of the puzzle. There is the song title. KEROSENE QUARTER.
Some of the visualizations of fire quarters in the night probably came from that random find as the theme developed, phone calls, desert, red twilight, Burning of kerosene, etc.
Later that evening or the next day I was looking for images of phone booths to help inspire me to complete the story of the song. After a chance stumble on a certain phone booth image (as seen above) and a further reading of the story of the Mojave phone booth I was aware that this song was beginning to flow into another pre-existing story line.
“Here I am, Making a call, waiting for the spirit to fall, fall on me, fall on all we do.”
I remember my initial active imagination/dreams of someone driving through a desert, stopping at a desert gas station. This person was making a call from an old phone booth in the desert.
Our main traveler is at the phone booth, with their tired head up against it.
The timing of these events is tough to remember as they all flow together now But first, the song came together in this way. When I stumbled onto the Mojave phone booth story that gave more life to the song.
What is the mojave phonebooth story? THIS IS A WHOLE STORY IN ITSELF! True story. There was a guy out in California, He had something like a hunch and felt like he was told to go out into the desert and wait at this lone phone booth in the middle of the Mojave desert. Story goes that he waited out there for 33 days or so just to answer this phone.. No calls at first, but then, people began to call from all over.
Click here to read the wiki A guy was in the middle of the desert answering phone calls from random people who would call in from all over the world. The phone booth became a meeting place, and people called from all over.(Germany, Russia, Japan, USA, etc etc). People would go out into the desert and just answer the calls from this booth. There’s a specific gps location for the original booth. There have been some people who wanted the phone booth removed and they did so BUT the spirit of the thing has been kept alive and people have restored the number and you can still call it. See Wiki link above.
So back to the story / imagination:
This lonely traveler is at the gas station, making the call. Eventually the sweat stings in the eyes , the heat is too much and the calm chill of night begins to set in and after many unanswered calls, they have had enough. No one is answering at the other line. Tired of trying and waiting, you can see the traveler reaching into their own pocket and throwing the remaining coins into the night .. they are thrown so hard and far with such incredible force that they burn red in the sky and set the night sky on fire. The phone lay there off the hook rocking back and forth. There was a shift. A legitimate answer of sorts.
Yes there is more to our travelers story… some hints are to be found in the lyrics themselves. The music can make sense of it in terms of the music.It is a work in progress.
Honestly I was following wherever this one led. I do think this one worthy of recording in a professional setting eventually. If you feel something listening to it as is that’s great. Maybe that’s enough.
Seems I am still following the trail of this song…
Interestingly, unbeknownst to me, a friend of mine recently bought a phone booth that looked a bit like the one I found the picture of, Talk about random fun. His family had a business in a local town and he had the chance of buying the local phone booth that stood outside his family’s store for years.. for about a hundred bucks. He wasn’t exactly sure why or what he was going to do with it but he got it cheaply and threw it in his truck. Right now it is sitting in his half finished barn. He is a also video specialist and shoots video for a living. Hmm as you can see..the story has a life of its own. It’s like a plant that just gets watered a bit and keeps growing.. hmm what next? We shall see.
Respect and hats off to life and you on your journey, wherever it may lead you.
Peace
