Shepard’s Bay: songwriter’s notes
We were staying outside of Capetown, South Africa in a town called Haut Bay. Capetown is worth a visit, if only for being one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen on earth.
The city wraps itself around Table Mountain and then heads south to wide vistas and rocky outcliffs. We spent a couple of nights in a hotel and then headed south. From our Haut Bay apartment the mountain rose impossibly foggy and beautiful. But South Africa is odd - if you trace a line down the perfect mountain road, to the perfect rocky beach bay, your finger will eventually pass over shanty towns. We had seen them on the cab in from Cape Town airport, slums like I had never seen before, their tin roofs stretching out for miles and miles, and here they were again, a perfect reminder of humanity’s desparate failings nestled in a valley of near-perfect beauty.
View from our Haut Bay place. I think.
We spent our days at the beach or driving around the cape and would return to our apartment and barbecue and write in the evenings. I think we must have loved it there and extended our stay a week week or so. Shepard’s Bay showed up some night while I was noodling around on guitar and Louise was singing. In that sense it must be one of our few truly co-written songs.
Normally Louise and I write separately. There's this odd privacy requirement for songwriting -- you're about to sing from the depths of your being, and if someone else is home (if someone else even might come home) your inner critic has a chance of showing up and sinking the whole endeavor. But here, if you care to listen to noodling, the skeleton of the song is already present.
I would smoke and stare at the mountain, thinking about the people living in the squalor in the beauty. One night I waking-hallucinated that I was driving down the mountain, taking the turns far too fast in some kind of Italian sports car, but I was running away from something, desperately trying to escape the city. Then the road behind me was running red with lava, and I was just trying to get away, away, get me out of this sick world this city, it just won't let me breathe, the suffering just never lets up...
The City only bends and sways
I'm running out of oxygen
So I'll follow the river down past Shepard's Bay