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The Gypsy Wind

I think of this song on two levels in a way….In one sense, parts of the song are drawn from an ocean passage I made as part of a crew on the schooner Avenger. Three of us sailed this ship, captained by my friend Tom Gallant (very distant relation) from Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia to the Caribbean by way of Bermuda, where Tom would charter it for the winter months. I helped him sail it down a couple of times, then I’d fly back up to the real world of the Canadian cold front again. We had a few adventures (including breaking a foremast after a gale), several storms, one hurricane, and a few strange occurrences. One night while we were south of Bermuda, at about two thirty in the morning, I was doing my turn at the helm and I heard what sounded like a choir singing (it sounded a bit like about 30 Neil Youngs singing the first 4 notes of “Helpless” over and over again.) I lashed the helm and went looking for the source of the sound but could find nothing to explain it. When Tom, the captain, came up to relieve me at about 3 am, I asked if he could hear anything, and he replied it sounded like he could hear a choir. We both sat there rather mystified and listened to that sound for a while. The scene shows up in a line in the song about a choir sounding like ghosts (of the “triangle”) who had been here before ...

On another level…I kind of see the song as a metaphorical thing describing one’s departure from a kind of fear, polarization, or an inability to move forward (or move on)....whether that fear is of the unknown, or of something like failure (oh gawd !) or just trying something you don’t know anything about …I leave that to the listener to interpret. It seemed like a good song to start with on this journey. (This is the only song that I previously recorded in French on “Le Vent Bohéme.”) - Lennie

 

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