A Child Who Grew Up

1 week ago by @jinx · @fileformat

Liner Notes

I'd been playing with this guitar riff for a couple of days without really knowing what to do with it. But then, just in time to rescue me from stagnation, my postcard from @fileformat for the #PostcardChallenge arrived!

Front:

Back:


The front features an artistic depiction of a book in chains, with a quote from Frederick Douglass: "Once you learn to read you will be forever free". On the back, @fileformat wrote: "Ordinary people can never fall over walls, because they never dare climb high enough to see what is beyond the walls."

These are some pretty great song seeds, and I rapidly started getting an idea of what I wanted to do with them... but it ended up going in a completely different direction! I was surprised, but hey, that's creativity for you. I used the guitar melody I'd been noodling around with, and wrote what I first thought was just going to be a "scratch lyric" to be improved later – then all of a sudden decided I liked it after all, and hit record. Boom.

#acoustic #guitar #GenderRoles #folk #indiefolk

Lyrics

Once there was a child
Who fell into a library
And never got out again

Once there was a child
Who learned to climb up walls
And was never contained again

Once there was a child
Who grew up

And then there was a boy
Who got teased for reading
So he closed his books and learned to play rough

And there was a girl
Told not to tear her pretty clothes
By climbing, so she stayed on the ground

Once there was a child
Who grew up

And now there’s a man
So scared of being a man
He never understood the rulebook

And there’s a woman
Enraged by being a woman
But she’s too weak to break the chains

But he used to read too
And she used to climb too

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