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Kentucky Music & Songs The Savage Life

Apple Creek

 

Portrait of Paul Mabray in green shirt in front of window, shades drawn

When I wrote this song, I thought everything would be better if we could all be savage beasts living in the wild. I liked to imagine the olden days when humans lived in tightly-knit communities, close to nature and richly steeped in tradition and ritual. By contrast, modern life felt sanitized and disconnected from nature, meaning, and other people.

A few years later, my dreams of living in a mud hut have died, but I still have savage fantasies of another sort. I wish that our minds could be restored to a more natural state, where our dreams, feelings, and perceptions would not be reigned in so much by artifice and conformity.

Humans seem (to me) to take on the traits of their environment, and I wonder if the prevalence of metals and machines causes us to strive to be more and more machine like- hard, glossy, competent, predictable and flawless, while cutting down the more soft, subjective, and chaotic aspects of our nature. Almost as though we are absorbing and internalizing the dreams of our computers.

On the other hand, considering that computers are made from the beautiful mineral silicon, maybe the dreams we absorb will not be all bad. Maybe going through a phase of learning to be more mineral-like is a natural part of human development.

Download MP3: Apple Creek