Sailor on a Windless Sea  
Written by: Nancy Hall
Performed by:
Nancy Hall – ukulele and vocals
Lee Parvin – harmonica and vocals
Jim Kerwin – acoustic bass

The Story –

“Once upon a time there was a society that just used everything up and seemed reluctant to admit that there might be a limit to the resources that made all the goodies they craved…”

Songs can come from a collection of images that pop up through the day, collecting in your head like flies on sticky paper. When they pile up, you have to do something with them!

Driving home one night, I heard a thing on the radio about how massively in debt a lot of people are, how they just kept digging that hole until it was too deep to crawl out of. That was a potent image, a person stuck at the bottom of a hole with a shovel in their hand having done the digging themselves.

Then when I got home, my husband and daughter were there and they literally had every light in the house on, the whole place was just blazing away like there was no tomorrow…literally! Also, we’d recently had a discussion about how we were the last ones to own every old jalopy we’d ever had, making our contribution to the graveyard for cars that had been driven into the ground. The ukulele was leaning against the couch and weirdly but sweetly tuned so I started strumming, letting the collection of pictures fly into a melody
and then a song.

Even people who think they are being careful and thoughtful are leaving a wake of debris behind them, so this is a merry dance to oblivion on the wheel of creation and destruction that is our lot here in the material world. “ I wish that somebody would tell me want this is all about…”