Some Lonesome Picker

I often get the feeling that I'm talking to the wind
And no-one hears, no-one listens in.
Then I start singing songs
And the music makes the whole world feel like home.
Sing a song and you're not alone.

Lily Mclean, you are standing on the rain
And you are cold, you are hungry and afraid.
You are waiting for a sunrise,
A sunrise makes you feel so very small.
Darling Lily, aren't we all?
I'm believing, believing, believing that even when I'm gone,
Maybe some lonesome picker will find some healing in this song.

Julie get the gun, Julie throw it in the river.
Let it roll far out to sea.
Let it carry the confusion,
The hatred and the worry here in me.
River rolling out to sea.

All lyrics copyright John Stewart

Interpretation

At the start of this song the singer is alone - a contrast to the community of Mother Country. We are back in the present. This song is about the power of song to heal through a cathartic recreation of the past. The wind (at first alien, but then a means of communication) which carries the words of the singer, also brings him to two striking images (from the past?). Songs - through the power of imagination and belief (emotional truth)- can carry these lonesome pickers (and the suicidal thoughts of Julie with her gun) away from their cold damp life. The life giving force of nature is portrayed through sun, river and sea. This shows that man is not alone but is part of a greater positive order. Like nature the songs also connect them to the past. Nature is linked to the honest,purer past. A song which started despairing finds life through song. This happens by drawing on the past to find the self (and values) rather than to submerge the self (literally here with the river image). The river image apart from linking to the past (through it's depths), also relates to the journey through time (past to present, and vica-versa) through it's flow (and the flow of the pistol downriver). Such images help transform the personal and mundane to the universal and sublime.