Never Quite Free

Lyrics

It's so good to learn
that right outside your window
There's only friendly fields
and open roads
And you'll sleep[1] better when you think
you've stepped back from the brink [2]
And found some peace inside yourself;
lay down your heavy load

It gets alright
to dream at night
Believe in solid skies
and slate blue earth below[3]
But when you see him, you'll know

It's okay to find
the faith to saunter forward
There's[4] no fear of shadows
spreading where you stand
And you'll breathe easier just knowing
that the worst is all behind you
And the waves that tossed the raft
all night have set you on dry land[5]

It gets okay
to praise the day
Believe in sheltering skies
and stable earth beneath
But hear his breath come[6]
through his teeth

Walk by faith
Tell no one what you've seen

It's so good to learn[10]
that from right here
the view goes on forever
And you'll never want for comfort,
and you'll never be alone
See[7] the sunset turning red,
let all be quiet in your head
And look about,
all the stars are coming out

They shine like steel swords
Wish me well where I go[8]
But when you see me, you'll know [9]

Banter

the curator of this website is one of those people who believes this song is hopeful. she has some ptsd and finds the fact that one is never completely free of one's past self-evident, and the idea that one can still find a future with peace is quite hopeful indeed. she also finds this song to be deeply, deeply true. jd fight me behind the buffalo wild wings that used to be a denny's. winner gets wings or something.

I suspect I will struggle through several future tours to describe what this song is about in a way that doesn’t bum people out in advance of the song. But here, let me give it a shot. Do you know how there’s that one person or event or thing in your life that you feel you will never ever ever ever shake yourself free of? And you’ve put in the work; you’ve done it and you’ve tried. And anyone who says that you haven’t is an asshole of the first order because you have spent many, many days and nights working on this and maybe money at the therapist’s office. And maybe you’ve gone into little dark holes of the world, taking all kinds of things to try and be free of this person or event. And this is going to sound like a planned thing but the thing is, this is how I wrote this song. I had a bunch of titles; I didn’t know quite how to find the three word title that would describe the content of the song and, of course, it must have three words because of the OCD. And then one day I settled on this and it’s called Never Quite Free. (2011-03-29)
This is a song about the nagging feeling that your demons will pursue you to the grave, um, I mean I don't know that they will, but I can't assure you that they don't. (2011-03-30)
I always feel a little guilty when I demystify this song because people find it kind of upbeat and cheery and, like, comforting. And, like, that's a great honor, and I'm so proud that people can use the song for that purpose. But this song is about having one thing in your life that you can never quite get free from no matter how hard you try. It's called 'Never Quite Free.' (2012-01-31)
JD: So, I listen to a lot of Jackson Browne. But if I could say - and who am I to criticize a songwriter who is my superior in every way - but, he doesn’t really address people turning into wolves in their minds enough in these songs. So musically, this is kind of a Jackson Browne pastiche. Lyrically, it has more people turning into a wolf in their minds than most Jackson Browne songs do. To the best of my knowledge and I have most of the albums. It’s about how if you have a thing- [audience loses their shit, JD laughs] That’s really funny!
Peter: You’ve created… a monster.
JD: [Laughs] So, this song is about - I mean, beyond what I’ve told you about it - it’s about how you carry a vision of yourself that is hard, sometimes, to shake. And when I say hard, I’m soft-soaping the case because people who know what I’m talking about know that it’s not hard, it’s impossible. (2012-10-16)
I didn't do a check to see if I know the lyrics - I put it on the setlist, we were talking about doing that one, oh, let's do that one, 'cause you talk about doing one and if you don't get it done in the first five or six nights of tour, it just goes away. Aw man, we were gonna do that one, we didn't do that one. [crowd calls to do it anyway] Yes, you can say that, but when I forget lyrics, I can't really just improv. Ya know, I can't just - I'll just say some stuff about the mummy. It'll be cool, right? You can't just drag the mummy in. You have to have a basic precept of fiction and poetry, if you're gonna bring the mummy in, you have to have a reason. Some compelling reason for the mummy to come on stage. He can't just wander - if he does this, your professors - they say "once again, John, you brought the mummy." Well he's what the story's really all about - no. (2015-04-07 - Cat's Cradle, Carrboro)
JD: As I transition to full Diva Mode, we're doing more and more songs where I don't have to play an instrument so that I can be free to [unintelligible]. Prepare for that. Because you know, Madonna once stood on this stage. [unintelligible] She hasn't been answering my phone calls, when I pitched this song to her. It's one I feel that she should really do.
Peter: When Madonna was on the stage, could you hear screamo coming up through the floor?
JD: No, but I remember at that time, there was a fierce yearning in her eyes, and I feel it was the yearning for the as-yet-unborn screamo genre. She awaited, going, where, where are these bands? Where is As I Lay Dying? Where are these guys? Their time had not come yet, but their time is now. It's weird, 'cause I can't hear their music, I just feel a faint rumbling and I feel like, oh, I better do this song pretty good because the stage is going to explode. I deeply regret that I don't have my swoop haircut to stand in the [unintelligible] screamo. And I could have had one, I could have said, give me another swoop, but I did not. This song has very little to do with most of that. It's about, um. This song is about. [faint screamo is audible] The things that you feel define you, that you hope one day to shake free of. (2015-04-09 - Webster Hall, NYC)
I always feel like saying what it's about is cheating people out of a more comforting misinterpretation... What the song is about is what its title says. It's about not being able to ever fully entirely feel loosed from something that bound you, no matter how you see the evidence of your bondage growing old and desiccated underneath you and no longer actually has its grip on you. But there's still the marks where the ropes were. (2015-04-11 - City Winery, New York City)
This is kind of like, a depressing song that gets mistaken for an optimistic song. [woo!] Which is cool because on the plane of the absolute they are equivalent. That mistake is in fact a deeper insight, so. There was, oh man, this is going to be a meaningless reference to literally 100% of people in this room. There was a zine in the mid-80s, I do not know what it was called, it was a bunch of collages or sometimes just a page from Good Housekeeping or whatever, images, you know, like, a Buick Sentry, and a turkey, and a happy family, and a dog, and each page would say "all the same". That was the whole zine. It was about the greatest thing I ever saw in my life. And it was sort of, in my opinion, the zine was trying to explain to people how a song can be both extraordinarily depressing and also a little uplifting. (2015-04-13 - Union Transfer, Philadelphia)
It is a song about a sort of cautious optimism. (2015-04-16 - Bogart's, Cincinnati)
This is a song about needing very badly to get free, and not being able to do so, and having that feeling over a long, long, long long period of time. (2015-04-22 - The Wexner Center, Columbus)
This is a song about the things that haunt you. And I think that we hear the word "haunt" from such an early age, we really start to discount it. We think, what would it mean that there's some deathless force that perceives us. Cause if something haunts you, I think the idea of actually managing to purge it or make it go away is a little vain. A haunting is a real thing. A haunting is something you really have to debate over the course of centuries. Leave yourself a little haunting. (2015-04-23 - Mr. Smalls, Millvale)
Because I feel the need to confess my shortcomings to eternal witnesses and stuff, before people, and what feels that need too is self serving. Because you enjoy it, you confess your failings and then go "now I've confessed my failings. I'm kinda cool." But there's a thing, I learned this all over this city, and I'm religiously obsessive, so I'm like, wow, this isa place where a staggering percentage of people were raised with the same faith. That is really fascinating to me, and if you've seen me play SLC before, you know this about me, because then I can't shut up about LDS stuff. You're very nice with me about it, but I'm sitting here going, oh, well, the thing about the LDS is in upstate New York they found the tablets and... And you all already know that, right, you all don't need me to hip you to any of that. So I'm patting myself on the back for how little I've talked about it. [cheering] And I only mention that because there's a lot of stuff in my thinking around - there's heavily - this is a long story. I might have told you this story last time. But when I was 18 or 19, I was kind of a train wreck of a person, but I was also a snotty goth. And then, so, at that time, few people in the room were old enough to remember this, but there was an outreach program of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, that they were trying to - they still do this - to get people just so they'll know what it is, becuase people have a lot of misconceptions about the whole thing. I mean it's quasi-evangelical, but I assert having had the elders in my home many times, I really firmly believe that their main issue is "just so you know what we're actually about, just so you don't think funny things about us, because for a long time the US government thought funny things about us, and really persecuted us relentlessly, so we'll tell you what we are actually like." And so they did, right, and they would come every week to my hovel of a drug-infested house and say, hey, you guys want some God? Nah, nah. And he'd read to me from the book, we'd have a word of prayer before and after. I don't care where you are in your faith, it's nice to have a little word of prayer, you know, and you can still be a total atheist and enjoy yourself a nice prayer. It's a good thing. So, y'know, like I said, I was a mess, and suddenly, my lease was up and I had to go back to California next week, and I had no idea what to do, and the room's a total absolute fuckin' - it looks like a rocket hit it because that's how I lived then. And at this time, to be honest. But, so, I"m sitting here looking here at this giant wreck going, where am I gonna put this stuff, I know where the storage space is, but I don't have a car or friends, so I don't know what I'm gonna do about this. And the phone buzzes. Who is it? It's the elders, and they're here to talk about Heavenly Father, so I go, let's do this. They come up, is now a bad time? And they look at you, and I say, yeah, man, I don't know where I'm gonna put all my stuff! And they say, oh, we know a guy with a truck, and they called him up. This is how you get people to wanna join your church. If you're like, well, the baptists didn't help me, the Catholics don't even know who I am...but the Mormons helped me out. And the why that they had come over was because I had ordered - this is a long story but trust me, it's going somewhere, because I"d been up late, high every night, very very high, on very heavy drugs, [woo!] no, not woo! And some drugs are nice and woo, you can do them and go on with your life, the drugs I'm talking about, they leave scars. That means you get to tell stories about 'em later, but there is a tradeoff. But yeah, I'm doing the kind of stuff that you don't brag about doing. And it's two AM and there's this commercial for a tape called Bounce Back, which is part of the outreach, and it's about how if you are depressed, there's stuff you can do, right? And this commercial aired at 2 am every single night. And I know, because I was up at 2 am every single night with the tv on and a cigarette in my hand, and I said, man, I wanna hear your tape. went out to the hall phone, didn't have my own phone because I'd been cut off for not paying the bill. Said hey man, send me that bounce back tape. They said, yeah man, do you want some missionaries to come and explain the church to you? and I said eeehhhh, and they said, come on, and I said ahh why not. [laughter] So, and they taught me a lot of stuff, and some of it has to do with the idea of your body and your rleationship to it, because as most of you know, there's this heavy idea in Mormonism that if you get a good one, if you go to the afterlife, you have a perfect body later on. For those of us who have a difficult relationship with our bodies, this is a teaching with a real appeal. (2015-05-27 - Urban Lounge, Salt Lake City)
This is a song about our - I don't mean these guys. People who are like me, and our conflicting relationships with our own bodies from time to time. (2015-05-29 - The Showbox, Seattle)
This is a song about the rear-view mirror, which is a weird place to hang out because the ones in your car, like, you drive and the thing in it gets smaller and then it's gone, right? But then there's the other internal rear-view mirror where the shapes grow bigger and larger according to their own sort of calculus that you can't really figure out. But you sort of have to have faith that eventually you'll be far enough down the road that the thing that was there constantly, for most of the drive, will recede and recede and be invisible. (2015-06-01 The Fillmore)
This is a song about a sort of - you tread lightly around a word like 'liberated,' but - this is a song about wanting to liberate yourself from things that genuinely bind you, and feeling as though the last little bits of those cords will never quite be off your skin. (2015-06-03 - The Mayan, Los Angeles)
This is a song about going through trauma. (2016-04-16)
This was on All Eternals Deck. I think people should use songs for whatever they want to use them for, but every so often I meet someone who considers this a very hopeful song, and I go, 'cool'. I mean it is called, never quite free. I thought I put it up there in the title, but, hey. Stay out of the results, as they say. (2021-08-06 The Orange Peel)

Live Performances

Footnotes

1. "feel better" (2015-05-27, 2015-06-02, 2015-06-03, 2021-08-08)
2. "moved on past the brink" (2015-04-07)
3. These lines (and the corresponding couplet later in the song) are often swapped or scrambled in some way. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to parse meaning, should there be any. 4. "with" (2015-04-09, 2015-04-16, 2015-04-23, 2015-04-29, 2021-08-08)
5. "set you down on dry land" (2015-04-07, 2015-04-09, 2015-04-13, 2015-04-16, 2015-04-17, 2015-04-22, 2015-04-23, 2015-05-27, 2015-05-29, 2015-06-01, 2015-06-03, 2021-08-08)
6. "come whistling hotly" (2015-04-11, 2015-04-13, 2015-06-02, 2021-08-06, 2021-08-08), "rushing" (2015-04-07), "whistling" (2015-04-09), "come whistling sometimes" (2015-04-16, 2015-06-01), "come whistling" (2015-04-17), "come whistling every night" (2015-04-22, 2015-04-23), "come whistling some nights" (2015-05-27), "come whistling hotly sometimes"(2015-06-03)
7. "you can see" (2021-08-08)
8. "you can wish me well where you see me go" (2015-05-29, 2015-06-03, 2021-08-06, 2021-08-08), "you can wish me well" (2015-04-09, 2015-04-16, 2015-04-17, 2015-04-23, 2015-05-27)
9. "when you see me, when my change comes, you'll know (2015-04-22, 2015-04-23, 2015-05-27, 2015-05-29, 2015-06-01, 2015-06-02, 2015-06-03, 2021-08-06, 2021-08-08), "when you see me change, you'll know" (2015-04-07), "but when you see me change too, you'll know" (2015-04-09). "when you see me changed, you'll know" (2015-04-11)
10. "know" (2015-06-02)