Take Me Back Home

"Take Me Back Home" was released as a single and is the eighth track on The Light the Dead See.

Lyrics

Dave's Take

Dave and Rich Machin talk about this song at the 0:29 mark.

My Take

What a warm and cozy-sounding song...it sure feels like home- I should have known...er, sorry, wrong "home" song. Actually, this is another (hidden?) gem among Dave's works. It has a very gospel-y, old-timey blues feel to it, and the organ and guitars as well as the vocals serve to add a lot of that homey warmth to it. The lyrics poignantly express a longing for something familiar- a place where one can be comfortable and just be themselves- not even necessarily a physical place, but almost like a state of mind, inspired by a person who makes one feel at home no matter where they are ("As long as you were right with me here, there's nothing else that I would need"). As Dave sings the word, "home," in that rich, full baritone, he is echoed by the buttery voices of a small choir, driving the point, well...home. The call-and-response sections are wonderful and uplifting, especially when all of the instrumentation stops and we are left to hear just Dave and the choir singers sing back and forth. It's one of those songs that kind of surprises you to be part of Dave's repertoire, but hey, the man is full of surprises sometimes.

Music Video

The video opens to an old man holding a wooden box and smoking a cigarette. Later, he is seen driving down a desert highway on a clear day in a light blue and white pickup truck. He has the box with him and on the lid, the initials, "E.L." are seen on it in fancy-looking letters. It is a box with cremated human ashes, and soon we find out that the ashes belong to someone very special to the old man- a woman whom we see every now and then as a young person in short, random vignettes. We are also treated to random scenes of the old man in his younger days, driving in the same pickup truck. He finds a pink seashell on the ground in the desert and picks it up and takes it with him. The young man is seen in the mountains sitting on a log and the woman reaches over and holds his hand. In the next scene, the old man stops at a beach and brings the wooden box with him as he approaches the water. From here, the scene alternates between the young man putting the seashell on the sand and letting the ocean waves wash it away and also the old man opening the box and scattering the ashes into the ocean. The young man looks to his side and sees the young woman standing there, smiling at him. The scene then cuts to the old man, looking in the same direction and smiling back.

My Take

I admit, it took me a while to figure out what exactly was going on in this video. The use of the same truck made it obvious that both the young man and the old man were the same person, as well as the random visions of the same young woman- whom I took to be the man's wife or at the very least, significant other. But I couldn't quite figure out what the significance of the seashell was. Then, I saw that someone made a comment that the young man was taking the seashell back to the ocean where it belonged and that's where he first met the young woman. So then, that made the significance of spreading her ashes in the same place where they met decades later all the greater. In both instances, the man was bringing things back to their "homes"- first, the seashell, and then the woman's ashes. The final scene where the old man looks at the place where the young woman first stood when they had first met is especially poignant; you can see in his eyes that he misses her, but also seems happy that he could bring her back to where they had first met each other.