From the recording Far Side Of The Sea (2016)
My aunt was killed in a freak car accident in south Louisiana on November 29, 2011. I began writing this song that evening while trying to imagine the hollow, unimaginable sadness my uncle must have been experiencing at the sudden, tragic loss of his wife. A few months later I became acquainted with a father whose teenage son had died in his arms. In an interview the dad gave to bring awareness to prescription drug abuse, he recounted early days of playing hide and seek in their house with his young son, recalling how his boy would try to “sneak and surprise” him. Deeply grieving, the father would have done anything to get his child back, to breathe life into his loved one, to bring him back to the land of the living.
Lyrics
Beautiful One (Nowhere)
Peace retreats into infinite grief
The scene of an act’s final line
Life is a whisper that’s spoken and gone
Its words cling to those who survive
Born like a shadow on Eden’s bright plain
A hope that we never outgrew
And all that we cherished, God only knows,
How I will go on without you
There’s nowhere, nowhere to hold you,
No place to run
There’s no perfect peace, no perfect pleasure
‘Neath heaven or earth or sun
In the death of the beautiful one
The prelude to winter, the pausing of earth
The aching heart crumbles in place
Here in the midnight of the valley of death
Peace seems a river away
There’s nowhere, nowhere to hold you,
No place to run
There’s no perfect peace, no perfect pleasure
‘Neath heaven or earth or sun
In the death of the beautiful one
Come alive, my beautiful one
I want to hide with my beautiful one
Sneak and surprise me, oh beautiful one
I come alive with my beautiful one
I want to hide with my beautiful one
Sneak and surprise me, oh beautiful one
I come alive with my beautiful one
I want to hide with my beautiful one
I will fight for you, my beautiful one