My Morning Jacket - "Dondante"

One of the ways I think I’m probably different than a lot of people is that I still like to buy cds over just downloading songs/albums directly from the internet. I like having the physical product but more so than that is that I really enjoy reading and analyzing lyrics and liner notes.

Sometimes songs click with you the first time you hear them or sometimes you hear them live and they take on completely different meanings. This past year, I really got into this song called “Dondante” by My Morning Jacket. I saw them play it live a few times and each time it was just incredible… each performance seemed better than the last. It’s quickly become one of my favorite songs to see in concert but I realized that I had no idea what the hell it was about.

Recently I started reading the lyrics and trying to figure out what they meant, who they were about, what was the story to tell here? The opening really struck me….

In a dream I saw you walkin’
Like a kid alive and talking
That was you

Earlier this week I was searching around trying to find more online and it turns out that the song was written for a friend of the band who had some struggles and passed away a few years ago. It’s really a sad song but if you didn’t pay attention to the lyrics and just saw the live performance, it’s so epic in person that you might not really know what was going on.

Needless to say, it’s taken on a different meaning for me after finding out so much more about why this was written and just taking some time to read over the lyrics. Jim James emotionally speaks about this a bit in the video above from VH1’s Storyteller’s and you can really understand where he was coming from when he wrote this, and how much hurt he has from the passing of his friend.

I’m sure this was not an easy song to write but it’s extremely powerful and I like what Jim says after the performance……… “and everything is going to be okay, and he is okay out there somewhere, so the story has a happy ending.”