Deliver Me
(B. Mosley)
appears on Light & Blood
This song was very much about mourning and preparing to move forward.
When we recorded Light & Blood in Woodstock, we did this song last. We wanted to make a departure from how we’d tracked the previous songs—with me in a booth. I played it in the live room with a single Royer ribbon mic placed to get the vocals & the dobro amp—with levels, stereo image, the sound of the space baked in—all at once. I recall the mixing process on this was merely five minutes or so of applying EQ.
I don’t play this version anymore…well, maybe twice in the past 14 years. As with a few other things I’ve recorded, I have revisited the song with a very contrasting tempo, feel and slightly different lyrics. “Deliver Me II” is a funky, bluesy stomper that has become a very frequent closer onstage. I recorded the funkier version in Tupelo, Mississippi just before moving to Australia…I’ll get that project released someday, by damn.
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Deliver me now to my grown reasons
Let me dissolve to light and blood
Patience, I dare not crucify the hour
Yield up time, trying to find my road
Pay off the child’s mind behind us
On the way home to hope and grace
Everything never been said getting tied up in sorrow
Walking on the bones of worry and shame
Lacking the fruit of thy womb I come to stillness
And you try to run from the wind
My soul lights the day come calling
Hollering, “Bring me home again”
Fallen and burned I come to my calling
A penniless clown where the road don’t go on
Upon my bones I say no more women
‘Til there’s one that don’t me to need nothing of my own
Deliver me now to my grown reasons
Let me dissolve to light and blood
Patience, I dare not crucify the hour
Yield up time, trying to find my road