the dawn of darkness and the blood upon our hands

Estimated reading time is 4 minutes.

FOR SEVERAL YEARS I toiled at a restaurant while working on building my blogs. We had piped-in music via one of those satellite feeds: select a genre and hear the same damn songs over and over at a volume that was hearable but rarely allowed for the identification of the artist let alone the lyrics.

One such selection—played to the point that I was able to recognize it anywhere in the song’s playing—sounded like a particularly noxious children’s song. It was enough to drive a sane man to drink and make a sober man crazy!

On one of the rare nights when I closed the restaurant, we turned the music up and I actually heard the recording for the first time—and all the way through.

And, lo and behold, I fell in love with the damn thing!

 

This is the album version of Out Of Our Heads that played incessantly at the store where I worked when it was a hit.

Out of our heads

Best was when I discovered the absolutely groovy video that accompanied the record’s release. Seeing this video on YouTube for the first time brought a HUGE smile to my face: the Spirit of the Sixties lives right on right here!

So now the hearing of the song made the work a little more bearable. I had to ask several people before someone identified the artist as Sheryl Crow and the songs as Out Of Our Heads. Here are the oh-so-Sixties lyrics:

If you feel you want to fight me,
there’s a chain around your mind.
Something holding you tightly,
what is real is so hard to find.

Losing babies to genocide—
where’s the meaning in that plight?

Can’t you see that we’ve really bought into
every word they proclaimed and every lie?

If we could only get out of our heads,
out of our heads and into our hearts.
If we could only get out of our heads,
out of our heads and into our hearts.

Someone’s feeding on your anger;
someone’s been whispering in your ear.
You’ve seen his face before,
you’ve been played before,
these aren’t the words you need to hear.

Through the dawn of darkness blindly,
you have blood upon your hands.
All the world will treat you kindly,
but only the heart can understand.

If we could only get out of our heads,
out of our heads and into our hearts.
Children of Abraham lay down your fears,
swallow your tears and look to your heart.

If we could only get out of our heads,
out of our heads and into our hearts.
Children of Abraham lay down your fears,
swallow your tears and look to your heart.

Every man is his own prophet,
every prophet’s just a man.
I say all the women stand up,
say ‘Yes’ to themselves,
teach your children the best you can.

Let every man bow to the best in himself,
we’re not killing any more.
We’re the wisest ones, everybody listen,
’cause you can’t fight this feeling any more.

If we could only get out of our heads,
out of our heads and into our hearts.
Children of Abraham lay down your fears,
swallow your tears and look to your heart.

If we could only get out of our heads,
out of our heads and into our hearts.
Children of Abraham lay down your fears,
swallow your tears and look to your heart.

But back to Out Of Our Heads: the arrangement’s gentle Jamaican rhythm is more ska-like than reggae and would not have been out of place on AM radio in the mid-’60s. I don’t know why, but whenever I hear this I close my eyes and imagine Smokey Robinson and his wondrous Miracles singing this song.

 

While the album version of Out Of Our Heads was c recorded in late 2007, by July 2008 Crow had rearranged the song, and that new vision can be heard on this live performance, also preserved (if only temporarily) by the magic of the Internet!

Look to your heart for darkness

So now Out Of Our Heads is one of my favorite records of the past few decades and I was motivated to actually buy the CD that featured the track. So it goes that DETOURS was my introduction to Ms. Crowe and I now count myself a fan.

DETOURS was Crow’s sixth album (2008) but not one of her most commercially successful: it was her first not to go gold in the US. It was nominated for a 2009 Grammy Award in the category for Best Pop Vocal Album but lost out to ROCKFERRY by someone or something called Duffy.

Yeah yeah yeah, I am of the generation that wanted to own, to posses, the music that we loved. A simple download of some bits onto my computer would not suffice.

Sheryl Crow’s ‘Out Of Our Heads’ would not have been out of place on Top 40 radio in the ’60s. Click To Tweet

Photo of Sheryl Crow at the Montreux Jazz Festival 2008 surrounded by darkness.

FEATURED IMAGE: Sheryl Crow at the Montreux Jazz  Festival on May 7, 2008. She’s pointing to the left centerfield bleachers, telling the audience that’s where she’s gonna put the next one. Finally, this brief article was originally published as “the spirit of the sixties lives right on right here” on Neal Umphred Dot Com on August 17, 2013.

 


 

Leave a Comment