Deborah Crooks

 Track 5: “A Garden”
This tune wasn’t going to be on the record—it wasn’t even in its present form—when I first went into the studio to work on The Department of the West last January. But midway through rehearsals, Kevin asked if I had more songs, commenting that perhaps we’d get through the 10 I had on deck quickly, and we’d have studio time left over for something else.
So I went home and looked through my papers, and found a draft of this song from 2010, written while pit-stopping at a friend’s place in Santa Fe, NM, just before I was set to fly to India for a couple months.
It was a time of adventure and living lightly: I’d pared my possessions down so I was was ready to make such moves at a moment’s notice. No pets, no full-time job, no long lease, no significant other.
In truth, the apparent carefree grooviness of my lifestyle masked a lot of my fear and disappointment.

It was a time of change and adventure ...and of feeling perpetually heartbroken.
Flash-forward nearly 10 years, and I found the first draft of the song had a lot of feeling...but it wasn’t quite there. Moreover, I now had a different perspective on the emotions that led to the lyric in the first place...and more compassion for the broken parts of we humans and inevitable messiness of life that often keep us apart from those we love. So I changed up the chorus, revised the bridge, Kwame suggested a chord change, and it became something new.
That said, the first lines, inspired by the big star-studded night sky of New Mexico, remain intact:
“there are different ways to read the stars/those that are near and those that are far/watch them shoot across the sky/I wonder where you are?”
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“A Garden” by Deborah Crooks, track 5 on The Department of the West.