“Sticks and Stones” - a song about change
Recorded at Horseshoe Pond in the CVNP (Cuyahoga Valley National Park)
Story Pairing
When we were kids we used to leave our toys laying around, just standard kid stuff. My dad would come around and he would say how lucky we were to have toys. When he was a kid he had two.
He said he had a stick and a stone, and he broke his stick and lost his stone.
At some point we asked our grandma and she said that he had every tonka toy you could get.
At its core, this is a song about how things change and then we look back and long for simpler times. The thing is, we don’t know how to do the things you had to know how to do to survive in simpler times. I think about how much my dad knows. He could build a house start to finish, I’d be lucky to build a sand castle. Then keep looking a generation or two back, and all the things people would do by hand, all of the inventions, it’s kind of mind blowing.
Now we are entering the AI era, where we don’t have to know a damn thing. We can just type in a request. And working with your hands? pssshh. That’s only for the poor or machines. The shift is stark and troubling.
I long to know more and to be able to do more. I actually just joined a Makerspace to combat that shift in my world. I want to get good at wood working, and learn to weld, and make pottery. High on my list is being able to turn on a lathe and make wooden bowls. I want to get back to being a person where my hands tell a story without any words. I also think that having busy hands will lead to a much happier life.
Anyway, I invite you to listen to this and daydream about simpler times. Not easier times, just simpler. Big difference. I also invite you to lean into something like that, be it gardening, woodworking, carving, baking, whatever. It’s just stunning how much doing productive things with a blatant physical outcome shifts your mood and appreciation for just about everything around you.
Song Structure
Verse: E - E - E - B7 - E
Chorus: A - E - B7 - E
Voice Memos
None exist. This is one of the oldest songs I have, and I don’t have anything.
No Notebook Page
Maybe 2017?
Lyrics
They used to get around by bus
They used to get around by train
Used to work out in the hot sun
Used to work out in the rain
We never had it quite the same
Used to get their news from paper
Used to believe what it claimed
Get your face inside it
Call that fortune, call that fame
We never had it quite the same
We still sing so many songs of things we never knew
We say we wanna go back but we can’t do the things that they could do
When's the last time that you had, Blisters on both hands
From working day and night, all day and night, and living off the land
Up the hill both ways, 26 hour work days
Had a stick and I had a stone
Broke that stick and I broke that stone
These are things I’ve never known
Break
They never shot their brothers child (stop)
That's not the way to practice aim
All that dying all that killing
Wasn’t thought of as a game
We never had it quite the same
Chorus
Break
Chorus