Water from a Rock
A song about everyone's favorite topic: grief!
Because I’m such a fun guy, here’s a song about everyone’s favorite topic: grief!
I read something that said grief is not a feeling or even an emotion, but a container for all of the feelings and emotions one experiences around loss. In my own experience, I feel like this is accurate.
I think grief is one of the most misunderstood human experiences. We tend to think of it as something to avoid—a dark, sticky, scary place where you can become trapped and drown in black quicksand. Although it is of course dark where grief exists, and some people do become stuck there, it’s not a dangerous place to avoid. It’s a necessary stop on the road to healing. (Or rather, it’s part of the road to healing.)
And it’s not a necessary evil, mind you…it’s the place where you can be the most honest and open about how you feel. It enables you to have BIG feelings. Good, bad, and otherwise. Anger, fear, sadness, whatever.
Grief itself isn’t painful; you need grief when you’re already experiencing pain. Grief is a vehicle for processing pain and finding a way out the other side. It’s transportive, transformative, and quite beautiful.
I have learned that grief is a dear friend.
(PSA: I strongly suggest finding a mental health professional who can help you process your grief. It’s not necessarily a task for amateurs.)
Because I remember lessons much better when I turn them into songs, I wrote “Water From a Rock.” The lyrics are particular to what was on my heart, but I bet a lot of folks will resonate with it: The realization that I’ll never get what I want and need from certain people. Try as I might, I’ve had to let go of the fantasy of a future where there’s acknowledgement and reconciliation on their part. It’s never going to happen. Not in small, intimate, 1-on-1 ways. And not in large, broad, community-level ways.
Might as well try to get water from a rock. Ouch. Oof. The pain. Good thing I got this here grief to carry me through to the other side.
An apt metaphor
As sometimes happens, the refrain to this song just sort of fell out of me. And it quickly became pretty much the thesis statement of the song: Grieve the things you used to believe.
You can take that line in a couple of different ways. Maybe it’s about actual beliefs you used to hold, around things like religion or faith. Or maybe it’s about things you used to think—about yourself, family, friends, community, the world, whatever—and you’ve had a heavy, unwelcome shift in understanding.
Whatever the case, when you have a profound change in belief or worldview or what have you, you do need to grieve that, because it’s a loss.
The rest of the specifics of the lyrics aside, one tidbit that I think is super important regardless: Honor the part of yourself that’s still a kid. I referenced this concept a bit in an earlier article, and I firmly believe it: We carry around these little-kid versions of ourselves inside. What happens to us, happens to them. Including how we treat them. They are pure truth. No hidin’ from them.
And so I have found for myself—and believe this is broadly true for others—that a great guide for feeling things and making our way through life is to always ensure that what we’re doing is honoring that little kid. Never do anything that hurts them, and always look to protect them.
I hope that others find themselves and their experiences in these lyrics.
Lyrics
Grieve, oh grieve the things you used to believe
That you can bring water from a rock
That you can get a stone wall to talk
That you can drink living water from a well that's all stopped up.
So they ignored all your needs?
Listening to god but always deaf to your pleas.
They'll give up anything their lords tell them to.
They'll even sacrifice you...
So you thought that you weren’t worth fighting for?
I hope you know you don’t have to think that anymore.
Steer into the pain ‘til you recover the skid.
And honor the part of yourself that's still a kid...
Grieve, oh grieve the things you used to believe.
Water from a rock. Water from a rock,
Oh, you’re never, ever, ever gonna get that water from a rock.
Music nerdery
I’m a firm believer that certain instruments contain certain songs. And when you sit down with them, they offer the songs to you.
I don’t really mean it in a mystical way necessarily, but if you’re tuning in closely, and listening with open ears, a particular instrument—played a particular way, at a particular time, with particular musings in your head—will produce a song that could never be created any other way.
It’s the timbre. The feel of the instrument. The smell of it, even. The chords or melody. A song just emerges.
Some of it is idiomatic. That is, certain chord progressions or harmonies or keys will appear only on a guitar, or the piano, or the banjo, or whatever, because of how different instruments are laid out. That’s why guitar players rarely write in, say, Eb major, and why piano players tend to find lots of 7th chords and funky chord inversions under their fingers.
When I play slide guitar, I play bottleneck style and typically use open E tuning. (That’s low to high: E B E G# B E…which is just an E major chord.) That tuning affects chord voicings. And when you’re playing with a slide, that further affects chord voicings. And it affects what keys are most comfortable to play in, versus a guitar in standard tuning being played normally.
All of the above is my meandering explanation as to how I ended up writing this song in the key of B major…ish.
I had been playing more slide guitar, and was looking (hoping?) to write something idiomatic…that is, something that would be unique to the slide guitar format. But I wanted to get away from writing yet another song in E major, which is kind of the default key for a lot of bottleneck slide guitar work (if you’re tuned to open E).
So I fiddled around until I found that B major is pretty comfortable. The I chord (B major) is right there on the 7th fret, and you can play E major (the IV chord of the key) with all open strings. And any time you hit that E chord, you can slide up to the 12th fret and play with some lower ringing strings while playing the higher two or three strings an octave up. It’s a really nice effect.
Also: At the time I was writing this song, I was in a Mood, and I needed to create something sort of reflective. And I’d recently been writing harmonically complex songs, and I wanted to keep one simpler. Slide guitar lends itself to a certain amount of simplicity in terms of chord structure, so that all seemed to fit.
Of course, in the end, I couldn’t help myself, and the song is a bit more harmonically complex than I intended. There are basically four sections that repeat (except for the final vamp):
Grief, oh grieve… B - E - F# - B
That you could bring water from a rock… E - F# - G#m - F#; G - F# - E; G - F# - B
So you thought… C#m - G#m - C#m - E - G#m - C#m - B - E - F#
Water from a rock, oh water from a rock… B - F# - E - B - F#
…it ended up being kind of a lot of chord changes. So it goes.
The overall form is a bit nonstandard. This is typical of my songwriting. I’m not sure if that grew out of my university composition training, a teenagery desire to be different, man, or…both, but I always try to create a form that works for the song instead of just plugging in a verse, chorus, and bridge. By instead thinking in terms of sections (A, B, C, etc.), I feel freer to shape a song rather than stay married to a particular form.
Aaaaanyway. As I mentioned above, the “refrain” is what came to me first. Grieve, oh grieve… The form emerged pretty organically from there.
Obviously, I needed to reflect on this main idea: Grieve the things you used to believe. Ok, what are some of those things? So the next section elaborates on that. That you can bring water from a rock… etc.
That gave me a pretty obvious A section and B section. The C section was less obvious. The A section is sort of…advice. A piece of wisdom. And the B section articulates what that means. I wanted to also speak to some really intense emotions, so by the time we arrive at the C section, that what needed to be there.
So they ignored all your needs… Etc. Pretty intense.
So I had A, B, and C sections that logically progressed from one to the next. I wanted to reiterate the A section idea, and I had more to say about the emotional part, so I found myself just repeating A-B-C (with new lyrics in the C section).
There’s nothing wrong with A-B-C-A-B-C form, but the song didn’t feel complete to me. I wanted to not just tap into some big emotions, but express them. The song needed a burst at the end. And besides, I wanted another section to round out the form.
So, the D section is a shout. It repeats the phrase “water from a rock” and, sadly, reminds us that you can’t ever get water from a rock. I also think it feels unexpected, musically speaking, which is almost always a good choice in a song.
Harmonically, I did a small thing that I think is really effective: A lot of the chord motion in this song is I-IV-V-I (that’s B major to E major to F# major to B major), but in this more bombastic final section, I flip the IV and the V. The initial motion is I-V, which is stronger than I-IV, and is just a different feel.
So the A section is I-IV-V-I, but the D section is I-V-IV-I. A subtle but effective sonic change, in my humble opinion.
In the end, the form is:
A-B-C
A-B-C
A-D…with a little A tag.
Also…as it turns out, this song works nicely on a regular guitar in standard tuning. I don’t have many songs that must be played on a slide guitar, so practically speaking, I didn’t want to drag yet another guitar to a gig just to play it on one or two songs. (It’s not just lugging another item…it’s also one more thing to sound check, one more thing to tune…)
Playing “Water from a rock” on a regular guitar in standard tuning requires me to play a lot of barre chords, but it actually lays pretty nicely, much to my delight.
So there you have it. You can listen to “Water from a rock” in full up at the top of this newsletter; on the Adventure Hat Playlist; and on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook.
And definitely catch the podcast version of this story, complete with a full performance of the song and audio examples of the music nerdery.