I Come and Stand at Every Door

This song has haunted me ever since I first heard it on 5D in 1966.  Lately I've been listening to the album on CD, and I decided to link to the video on Youtube.  It needs no more reason to post it, so just click on through and be moved.

I probably wouldn't have written it here (though I discussed it briefly in this post) but an old friend from high school, an artist and in those days a garage band musician, commented on the link that it took him back to when he and his wife lost their son, back in the Nineties.  And that reminded me of this post, in which I chided a friend who's a trained musician and composer for fuming about "how non-musicians hear music" and the associations they develop for certain songs.  Me, I'm just interested in those associations.

What my friend evidently took from the song was the image of the wandering ghost of a dead child, though at seven the narrator is much older than my friend's infant son, who died of natural causes rather than in an atomic bomb blast.  But that's how associations work.  I like to think that I relate to songs because of the lyrics as a whole -- I'm an English major, after all -- but not everyone does.