Song #4: “No Longer Strangers” is a farewell songs written to commemorate and honor my church youth group leader, Lois Leardi who was heading off to new adventures. One of the hugely influential sparks she lit in my creative life was the book, “Letters To A Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke. In particular I have loved the concept of “living with questions”. Sometimes we don’t have the answers to our burning questions and it’s because we might not be ready for the answers. Rilke’s advice to the young poet he was writing to was “love the questions themselves like locked doors that can not yet be opened to you because you would no be able to live the answers…” (I’ve paraphrased it here because my dog eared copy of “Letters To A Young Poet” is somewhere in a box from my recent move) Good stuff! For you guitar players out there, this is also my first use of “open tunings” on the guitar. For this song I re-tuned from the standard EADGBE to DADGAD.
PLEASE! Use headphones or decent speakers to listen to this instead of your tinny little computer speakers. It’s recorded in crystal clear digital sound and the headphones really make a difference!
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Lyrics
No Longer Strangers | Song # 4 | March 1977
You have passed another step
In that series of events
That grows around your life
You’ve done reasonably well
Though you’ve had your share
Of hard times and sorrow
You’ve been here for a while
But it’s time to move on
To new mountains and rivers
Refrain:
I think you realize
I think you know, that
We are no longer strangers
We are of the same family
We are no longer strangers…
I hope that you’re happy
You came to us here
Even though
There were times when you felt
You were being compared
To those who went before you
But don’t think of that now
Cause it’s over and done
And we don’t have much time left…
Refrain:
Bridge:
Words fail to express
The feeling we have for you
But I see in your eyes
That you understand
What I am speaking of
And when you’re out on your own
With no place to call home
Please remember
That we’ve traveled together
For quite a ways
Living with questions…
Refrain:
Tuning: DADGAD
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“No Longer Strangers” by Mark Shepard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License
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Back to Song Index 1976-1979
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