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about

An autobiographical song. After many years lamenting to my wife, Laura, that I never had brothers or sisters (an “only child”) she reminded me in her gentle way that I had a four-year-old brother who died of some unspecified kidney disease the year I was born and a sister, who was born with Down’s syndrome and died a few months later of pneumonia in what was referred to in the 50s as “a home,” but not mine. The scar for my parents was enormous, and indirectly, for me as well. The other character in the song is my dad, who died in 2008. But the song really is about the mystery of life and death itself. Philosophically speaking, we cannot really even know what it means to be alive if we cannot know its opposite, death. So we are always in existential limbo, always looking at an unanswerable question. And I guess if in death we are all the same spirit then maybe in life we are, too.

Written Sept. 4, 2012

lyrics

Where Did You Go?


You told me my sister died
when I woke up this morning
Told me she wasn’t coming home.
I stared at the ceiling stains
over my head.
I just kept asking myself
“Where did she go?”

My brother lived a few months
after I was born.
Never horse played with him on the couch.
A few of his toys remained
under my bead
I just keep asking myself
“Where is he now?”

Chorus:
If you say they went to heaven,
I’ll just ask you, “where is that?”
Tell me a story, one that’s tall.
Say they aren’t alive right now
and I’ll just ask you how
They ever could have lived at all

I hear that you slipped away
in your bed last night
You didn’t know me lately anyhow
But had you kept on talking
right until the end,
Would you have asked yourself,
“Where will I go now.”

Chorus

When I sleep eventually,
will you shed a tear?
Or laughter might be the best of all.
If you blow inside of me,
walking in my dreams.
In the morning when I wake,
where will you go.

Chorus.

credits

released March 19, 2014
Ken, guitar and vocal.
Backing vocal, Kris Olson (a very talented mother of two who also teaches music in Lubbock community centers).

Recorded at the Crossroads Recording Studio, Texas Tech University, 2012
.
Amy DeVoge, producer/engineer.

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about

Ken Baake Lubbock, Texas

Ken was born in Baltimore in 1955. He grew up hearing everyone from Johnny Mercer and Ray Charles to the Beatles on the family hi-fi, with a usual Saturday encore of Wagner's operas. Ken has degrees in English and economics and a background in journalism. He is currently an associate professor of English at Texas Tech, teaching classes in rhetoric. ... more

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