"Wild hearts without no faith
ain't no wild hearts at all."
Wild Hearts Forever

I have spent a lot of time digging up musical corpses from graveyards of words in the woods.  I have exhumed many poems and fitted them with wings to see if they will fly.  And indeed, some of them can fly quite gracefully.  The zombie poems flap their wings until they become songbirds of prey, at which point they take off and conduct strafing runs on my campsite.  I have to run around waving my guitar like a mosquito net until I catch the songs, and put them in my folder.  After they have been captured, I can teach them to the band.  Sometimes it happens quickly.

Sometimes it's a battle.

"Wild Hearts Forever" was a battle.  It was like watching a dogfight in the sky between the eagles and the singing zombie sparrows.  The verses came slowly.  They attacked the chorus midair, wrestling like a ball of dissonant feathers in the sky.  I don't know how many bridges the song has, but they all collapsed into the river.  Notes and words and other songwriting cargo fell into the water like toy cars in an earthquake, or fleas from the Golden Gate Bridge.  It was brutal.  The screams of all the notes and words careening to their deaths, while trapped inside the song, has haunted me for years.

But it was worth it.

I wrote "Wild Hearts Forever" on public land off of Hwy. 260 in Arizona, between Strawberry and Camp Verde.  Closer to Strawberry.  It was a peaceful location, high in the mountains and much cooler than the valley, but it always drove me crazy.  I couldn't stand the abandoned feeling I got from the horrible, sorrowful trees.  But you could sleep and bathe there in privacy, and no one would bother you.

It was isolated, just a dirt road blocked by a ramshackle barbed-wire fence made of large branches.  It might have been a real gate, I don't remember.  Whatever it was, you closed it behind you, locking yourself into the wilderness with the snakes and the mountain lions.  The state doesn't like it when songwriters and wild beasts roam the highway freely.

"Wild Hearts Forever" is a love song, of course (most songs are love songs, whether they know it or not.  Mainstream music today is comprised of soundfiles, not songs.  Clearly, there is no love anywhere near any of it).  It depicts the embrace of a pillar of fire by 2 unkempt, desert-rat casino refugees.  I understand the rule of the arts is to let the work speak for itself, but I think it's worth saying that it wasn't hell I was thinking of while describing the "flames of heaven" in the last chorus.  I was thinking of Joan of Arc, or perhaps a Tribulation saint.  While I think the truly wild heart will face the possibility of hellfire with the moral courage necessary to turn away from it, the lyric was intended to blend images of both Heaven and Hell like an impossible drink in the listener's mind.  "This doesn't really work," the soul should say, subconsciously at least.  And, of course, it doesn't work.  It wasn't meant to.

But in the conscious dream, I was thinking about Joan of Arc.

Thanks for listening.

Wild Hearts Forever

Wild hearts
confined to the heavens
wild hearts on a wing
wild hearts like triple red 7s
or a full house
aces & kings

Wild hearts
like oncoming traffic
wild hearts
like a pinball machine
wild hearts forever
and then some
wild hearts running free

Tonight's the night
we cast off from the harbor
and sail away past the pier
wave goodbye to the old
familiar mainland
we're all castaways here

     Our course may be charted in stickers
     on a dingy bathroom wall
     but wild hearts without no faith
     ain't no wild hearts at all

     And there's a mutiny deep in my chest
     in the space where the dirty rats crawl
     but wild hearts without no faith
     ain't no wild hearts at all

Wild hearts
float like a feather
on the edge of the fairy abyss
wild butterflies of leather
locked in a spiraling kiss

Wild heart
stay beneath my skin
be my weird tattoo
civilized hearts know when they're defeated
but wild hearts never do

     Ain't no one gonna tame me
     not even you
     ain't it enough that your love drives me crazy?
     Does it also have to be true?

Wild hearts bound
for death or glory
over the galloping waves
your kisses prevent the onset of scurvy
your smile keeps the bastards at bay

You're the sunshine in my sails
you're the ocean breeze
wild hearts
right up to the edge of the world
and the shore of the heavenly seas

     And the flames of heaven are lapping
     at our toes as the death-blows fall
     but wild hearts without no faith
     ain't no wild hearts at all

©2016 Nathan Payne