As promised, and entirely to late in arriving, here is my dissection of blue skies over bad lands… a great song by Matthew Good.
The song sets the stage in the middle of the night and a person unexplainably awakes from their sleep and wanders outside without shoes.
What if you woke up in the middle of the night
And in your bare feet you walked outside
I think here the song takes a turn from someone being awake to someone thinking their awake but really find themselves in a vivid dream in which they can fly anywhere.
And realizing that you were awake that you could fly
Out over the world
This person then finds them self in a place they do not know but have only heard of, maybe in school, but presumably on the TV. I interpret the person in this song is somewhere in the middle east and is seeing people that the news has “sold” as evil people and terrorists, or in his words, murderers. Matt is pointing out that we really don’t know the people on the other side of the planet. We only know what the government, TV or the newspapers tell us.
To places that you’ve only heard of
See faces that you were sold as murderers
He suggests that they are people just like us. They are struggling with life and emotionally lonely like most people everywhere.
But just like you they’re only lonely boys and girls
Like all over the world
The question is asked, what if we could do something to change the situation. What if we could take some accountability for our role in the world and do something that would make times not so rough for other people that struggle too.
What if you could lift them up?
What if you could make it so that times weren’t tough?
The result of personal accountability would leave nothing but the weather to be reported on the news everyday.
So every morning when the world woke up
There’d only be weather on the news
Then something interesting happens. Matt reverses the situation with us back at home and our perceived enemies flying around above us. A lot of people don’t realize that people in the middle east live in the same situation as we do… fed lies to keep us scared and fighting with each other.
And what if you were back in bed
With one of them floating over your head
The next statement, I think, is the most powerful in the song. So many of us hate people we don’t even know. Really, what would you say to someone you “hate” when you don’t really know what kind of relationship could have existed had our minds not been poisoned.
What do you say to your enemies
When you don’t know what it is that could have been between you?
Then in concluding Matt says the following statement which conveys that there is nothing good going on anywhere. Even when it seems like a pleasant day there is still this ugliness in the air. It may be unseen but it is there.
There ain’t no blue skies over bad lands
Even if it ain’t raining in the mornings
Lastly, a very modest statement. We don’t have to have dreams and fly anywhere to get whats going on. We just need to have understanding of each other and compassion, not being swept up in the media hype.
But you don’t need to fly to understand it
Just understand understanding
The image I created focuses on the aspect of being sold lies and I chose to pick on Capitol Hill. I think most of the information that is brought to us from that building is very self serving and skewed. The blue dark sky is dreamy and ominous in nature. I inverted the image with the intent of communicating that a lot of news is confusing and in reality upside down in nature. This also puts the blue sky under everything… making no blue skies over bad lands.
Please view this post if you want to hear the song, it is the second video in the post.
this is an interpretive image I design inspired by this song... I think it's as moody and heavy as the song.
