Demonstration Tapes: Eli The Barrow Boy

Out from the water troughs and the barrow downs

As I wrote in my post a couple weeks ago, 2004 was a busy year for me. I’d just quit my day job at a bookstore and my band was touring and recording pretty relentlessly. Thankfully, songs seemed to be coming thick and fast — I recall really being carried along by all that was happening. This song, Eli the Barrow Boy, came out of a spate of writing in the summer and fall of 2004 that would also draw down The Engine Driver and Mariner’s Revenge Song.

There was a twelve string guitar on the wall at the Portland Music Company, a Gibson J-185, that I’d long coveted. With the band more than breaking even on touring, I finally had a little spending money and I bought the guitar. It felt really audacious at the time; I was determined to immediately put this thing to work. Most of the songs I wrote around this time were written on this guitar.

Eli started as a strummy, uptempo thing. It was the chord progression and melody that first drew me to the idea and I promptly got the idea down on my tape recorder, letting nonsense words stand-in for lyrics. The cadence of the melody suggested something about a water trough; I imagine if I’d continued down this lane, someone was inevitably going to get drowned. Here’s that initial fragment: