Pancho’s Lament

I got deeply into this Tom Waits song years ago when I was living in a yurt in Colorado. My life felt unstable then. I was drinking too much, smoking lots of cigarettes, my first marriage was falling apart and I was trying to hold myself together while earning barely enough to get by working as a massage therapist at Massage Envy (the McDonald’s of the massage world).

I remember sitting there on warm summer afternoons with the doors of the yurt open, drinking beer while the bright Colorado sunlight lit up the mountains behind me. I was reading a lot of Carlos Castaneda at the time and searching for meaning in all the wrong places whilst probably romanticizing my own unraveling.

The chord changes in this song completely hooked me. It felt like someone sitting beside a campfire telling me a story late at night. Except somehow it felt like he was telling my story before it had even fully happened.

Hearing this song sent me down a Tin Pan Alley and American folk-blues rabbit hole I never wanted to climb out of. I remember thinking, What is this sound? I became obsessed with figuring it out. The chords, the phrasing, the bass walk downs and the feeling behind it all.

That road eventually led me to artists like Mississippi John Hurt, Townes Van Zandt, Merle Travis, and Doc Watson, among many others.

So thanks to Tom Waits for opening that door and let’s put another log onto the fire…

Here are some old pictures of my living in a yurt in Colorado days…