I gotta read that interview! I've seen that album as the ultimate, psychic personals-ad of rock and roll ever since the day I first heard it.

-Pat

The lamenting strings in the background remind me of Eleanor Rigby : Beatles

Hi all,
this is my favourite song of Suzanne. It's sound is marvellous, and engulf us in a moment of both introspection and a sigh longing for change.
Describing this music is extremelly hard, since it is very abstract and emotional.

How can we explain what it creates?simply by listening the strings, and they drown inside of our mind, leaving a calm ocean only swayed by small waves.
Does it make sense?

Along with "wooden horse", both songs reached an unique momentum of sensibility. The magic is in the sound they create along with suzanne's voice.

It is the perfect ending for a superb album like 99ºFD: after the fever, the violence,the disappointment, the anger, finally the moment to look to the horizon and aspire to some change in a world that seemed to fall appart.

Peace and love to everyone
Paulo
PS: my first post since undertow changed 2 years ago.hurray

---

- Are you serious?
- Yes, i am. I'm your guardian angel.
- Amazing!I've never believed in that.Am i dead?
- No. You're just hallucinating.

hey Paulo and all,

Lyrics aside, I've never considered this contrast between the industrial sound of most of the songs on this album and the soft, introspective sound of Song Of Sand and Private Goes Public (which is really the last song of the album, just not in the US). Thank you for the insight :-)
This song is very different from songs like Blood Makes Noise or Rock In This Pocket, much like Room Off The Street in DoOH (an impersonal song in a very personal album). However, it's not the only one, when you consider Blood Sings and Private Goes Public.
My point? who says I have a point? ;-)

Yuval =8-)

Song Of Sand, to me conjures up realms of scientific thought. Its another of Suzanne's songs that trigger my imagination regarding the mystery's of the universe.. (and I hope I dont end up sounding like a complete tripper, thou my mind was quite fragile the time these thoughts first came to be).

I belive to this day that the song "calypso" can actually disperse a grey cloud and make the sun shine. Rain danceing in some cultures have been very common over the years, and the way Neil Young portrayed "Needle And The Damage Done"
with the NO RAIN chant off the 'Live Rust" album
...It all makes wonder..
What stinging tune could split this endless noon and make the sky fill with rain?...I think slightly out of tune ,grungey aggresive songs can do that. The world does have its mystery's and maybe on opposite sides of our globe (where the water gurgles down the sink in a different
direction) the songs that here, create rain, may there ,bring on the sun.
The mention of sand ,as rock ,leads me to thought regarding rocks that have the ability to absorb heat... Can rocks and sound help us better understand environmental weather patterns?
To the mention of war in the song,(my choice is not go too deeply into this or I'll find myself with worries I'd pefer not to have) I see humans
bickering with each other when there just maybe a bigger underlying picture. If sand rock and sound does have a bearing towards our immediate environment ........Wow. .....I realy dont want to get on the wrong side of inticate nature.
I very much hope you towies dont think I'm a complete tripper,or I hope Im not treading on ground I shouldnt be near. I discovered Suzannes work some time ago and only till now I've realized there are thousands of fans that share the same Vega intrests.
To be a friend of the Undertow would be a frienship I would hold close to my heart.
vii
Berndog.
P.S. thanks for bringing the word Cosmos
into this thread Miloluvr.

Berndog,

Welcome to the tow and thanks for contributing to this thread on this beautiful song. Thank you for thanking me for bringing the word "cosmos" to the foray in discussing this song. SV certainly can be cosmic, at times. I think of this song and Pilgrimage in that regard.

-M

Hey Milo...Thanks for the thanks for the thanks
ect...
Pilgrimage...
Pilgrimage clearly show Suzanne's ability to hearken the gentle whispers of divine guidence.
She has been known to push some boundries, but in Pilgrimage, its like she has taken the ball in the cenre and put it straight into the goal ,while both teams kneel in prayer.
Evolution, evolution, evolution, the cosmos,a seed. Yes, as it is fruitfull to meditate on what is within, for a seed to germinate it must reach out.
Be in your centre, extened from your centre, return to your centre, the cenre grows. A seed
A cosmos, realms in a cosmos, realms underneath, realms in a piece of ash, evolving, travel, arriving, a step and an inch toward a source...

sincere thanks for the warm welcome Miloluvr.
Looking at my last post now ,It was trippy.

To fathom the depths of these two works are way
beond me. Sometimes to get to the deep, one must wade through the shallows, which are way over my head.
Berndog.

"Song of Sand" comes to my mind today. I am wondering whether self, just like the world, is continuum. World is continuum.... What does it mean? I don't know. Our self is like waves, all we know by ourselves is only a picture of waves. Dynamic picture. I was shocked, when I heard something like this. How the picture can be dynamic? Maybe sequence of pictures. Now, at the moment, is a picture, tomorrow is a picture, yesterday was a picture. But our self is not a picture, it's like waves. Are waves continuum, are pictures continuum? What sound make sand waves? Are sand waves the picture of sound waves? Is our self the picture of world continuum? We can make see ourselves different. It is enough one expression, one word and the picture changes. Is it really continuum?

Let's music plays everywhere.

Anna Maria K.

---

"like a shadow, I am and I am not"

i believe time is a continuum and so is life, when they're both taken as abstractions. each is a whole that carries on incessantly. but when we make our imprint on them, the whole is dismantled into parts, pieces we're responsible for, and so they become continuities, in the sense that they're continuous and unceasing, always pushing out existence, resistence and resilience.

our mind and our selves are jagged and tangential in their search for balance through connection, change, difference and adaptation. just like waves break, we try to fill in the gaps. and this process is dynamic and demanding. sometimes it takes a "stinging tune" that really "could split this endless noon" of the mind, a dry, desertic gap, "and make the sky swell with rain".

---

chance is the only thing that doesn't happen by chance

Dear Fátima,

Yes, we need very often "stinging tune" to make kind of progress. I am still disappointed that - as far I - I don't know the ocean, knowing only pictures of it. I dare to say I am not able to know the ocean. This is sad in some way. "Sky swelled with rain".... It seems to me today, that nothing is true, that all ideas come in order to cheat our selves, our minds, to make us swelled with rain, but this rain will never be able to fall down, or falling down is pointless or useless. To understand, to fill the gap in the picture only still not knowing that flood.

Time.. maybe it even doesn't exist and life consists of so many individuals which come and will go.

Anna Maria K.

---

"like a shadow, I am and I am not"

dear anna, i understand your disappointment and sadness. having been fortunate enough to live near the ocean all of my life, i can always carry the idea and the image of it wherever i go. you can't. on the old undertow, i once wrote about how we carry the sea inside us. our plasma has salt water in it. this truth has always comforted me: we're connected to something bigger, older and wiser than us.

all i mean to say is that you can only change yourself. in today's world change is something deeply rooted at an individual level. each of us has a "sky swelled with rain", with possibilities, within our minds. sting it with your will and rain will pour and it won't be pointless or useless. "any manner of want, any mind will do", as paula (who doesn't know the ocean either) once wrote on this message board. don't expect what must come from the inside to ever come from the outside. it never will. feel the ocean in you: this is all i can challenge you to do. it might sound utopian but it's what i believe. love, fátima

---

chance is the only thing that doesn't happen by chance

> how we carry the sea inside us

That reminds me of "Oceania" by Bjork...

I love the ocean, but am by nature an amphibious creature.
And I carry the sound of it with me too, as well as the salt.

Every few months, I feel the pull to revisist Song of Sand.  I try, although never successfully, to listen as if for the first time.  I am so humbled by the poignant resonance of this thoroughly well realized work of art.  I can think of no other song, by any artist, constructed so that all aspects (lyric, melody, meaning, tempo, etc.) work so fluidly together.  And, after reading the posts here, I would add, that the somber, minimalist  texture is so like the desert.  Seemingly so barren -- in reality so brimming... with longing for an unattainable quenching substance. 

Peace, Ra

ps  To Mikeg:  Bjork's Oceania ?  Yes !!

---

If sand waves were sound waves
What song would be in the air now?

Thanks for all the posts - they've helped me get to an understanding of this beautifully enigmatic song. I was having trouble reconciling the meaning of the two verses but now I feel like I have. I don't know if I have anything particularly new to contribute to the thread, but in any case...

For me, the song is about time and about how if people could have a perspective on history, and could see the consequences of action and reaction throughout time, many of our problems could be avoided. 

Sand reflects the passage of time, with every wave, every footstep, every gust of wind, leaving its mark. If a song could articulate this passage of time, the sky would know that what the desert needs is rain and would stop holding back. 

In the second verse, Suzanne is asking, if war were a game with rules, what rule could be like that song and would communicate the world's history in such a way that the fool would be overcome without a drop of blood being spilt. 

I really love this song - it's such a tight little knot of meaning and it's really wonderful trying to unpick it. 

I'm not religious but I give thanks for poetry, for song and for Suzanne Vega!