Windigo Knocking by Jack O' The Clock
It’s ironic to be releasing this song now, when a fire ban is in effect in our area of the Northeast and ponds are drying up. When I wrote “Windigo Knocking,” it seemed it would never stop raining. The summer had been so wet that a lot of the sugar maples that are emblematic of the area didn’t display any fall colors, collapsing instead into a sickening green-black. Drought or flood, it comes to the same thing: the season is sick.
In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer evokes the Anishinaabe legend Windigo, a hunger-wracked monster that haunts the margins of winter encampments in lean times, frozen-hearted and insatiable. “Born of our fears and our failings,” Kimmerer writes, “Windigo is the name for that within us which cares more for its own survival than anything else.” Windigo represents a system out of balance—its hunger only begets more hunger; its isolation from the group only deepens as it tries to interact with it forcibly and destructively.
Tracklist
| 1. | Windigo Knocking | 4:37 |
Lyrics
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WINDIGO KNOCKING
It looks like this fire isn’t starting:
the chimney will not draw;
smoke stings my eyes.
I slump in my chair like an old man
eyeballing a son he does not recognize.
I feel a burn on my thigh
like a lit cigarette.
I stand in pain and I cry out,
break into a sweat.
A wasp is crawling in circles
there on the seat, barely alive.
It’s nearly the end of November.
I don’t understand how it could survive.
I go and open the back door,
give the dog a kick
cuz it’s been raining for days now:
the season is sick.
And I’ll be damned if I don’t feel it
after a while, right down to the bone.
I’ll tell you I’ve got nothing for you.
This stinks of the truth. Now leave me alone.
“If you foreclose on tomorrow,”
comes a voice in the storm
“I’ll give you ten cents on the dollar
and you will be warm.”
It looks like this fire isn’t starting:
the chimney will not draw;
smoke stings my eyes.
I slump in my chair like an old man
eyeballing a world he does not recognize.
Credits
___________________________________________________________
Damon Waitkus - vocals, acoustic guitar, piano, glockenspiel, percussion, synth, baritone electric guitar
Victor Reynolds - bass, vocals, bass recorder, electric 12-string guitar, percussion
Recorded, mixed, and mastered by Damon Waitkus at Orchard Hill Studio, Brattleboro VT
License
CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. See the Creative Commons website for details.Tags
Recommendations
JACK O' THE CLOCK "presents a fine lesson on what it means to write songs that are at once approachable and human while simultaneously being incredibly profound in terms of timbre, depth of emotion, and harmonic complexity," Progulator.