From the Archives: "Walk With Me" (2000) (Patreon)

This is a demo of a duet called "Walk With Me," written by Dave Carter and recorded in our home studios (a.k.a. DogSpit Productions, Portland, Ore.) in October, 2000. It's part of a collection of demos we assembled as we were deciding which songs to include on our third and final album together, Drum Hat Buddha. For reasons I no longer remember, it didn't make the cut -- but it's not for lack of beauty, not for lack of truth.

"Walk With Me" is a tender, spacious meditation on time, winter, and separation. As you’ll often find in Dave’s songs, weather and landscape form the emotional terrain here—childhood paths buried by snow, rivers that may or may not be crossed together, harvests that once promised warmth but can’t undo the cold. The lines I sing are some of my favorites across Dave’s considerable catalog—“barley waving armies of the sun” gets me every time.

One of the characters mentions “the frozen fields of forty-one.” Back when Dave and I recorded this, he was 48 and I was 32. Forty-one was hovering right there between us, but it seemed as far off as the moon to me. Until today, I never really considered that Dave and I would have been looking at 41 from two very different perspectives.

By the time I actually was 41, it was 2009. Dave had been gone seven years. I was desperate to make sense of the years in between—what it meant to keep walking with a legacy, how long it had been since I’d last sung with Dave, and how much farther there was to go on the rather lonely path I’d charted for myself. I’d released a posthumous D&T album, Seven Is the Number, in 2006. I was very woo about the numbers back then and the juxtaposition of "Seven" (years, and the album) and my being 41 felt charged—felt significant. I sent the demo off to Richard Shindell, one of my best troubadour pals, and he agreed to sing Dave’s part.

But, alas: 41 came and went, and the recording never happened. I don’t really know why—criss-crossed tour schedules, lack of organization on my part, maybe a subtle resistance to fully inhabiting those “frozen fields” Dave writes about. Hard to say. Here’s the good news, though: as recently as last year, Richard was still up for recording the song. We’d probably have to bring it down a few steps to accommodate our maturing voices—we’re not 41 anymore, after all—but we'll get it done.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this old beauty. Let me know what you think—or more importantly, what you feel. I’d love to know which lyrics stand out for you at this point in your life.

Here's hoping you are safe, warm, and well as can be.

xotg