Avalanche

I heard a song on the radio the other day by Shawn Colvin called “Shotgun Down the Avalanche” from her album “Steady On,” Columbia Records 1989. And now it is a bit of an earworm for me so I am writing about it to see if it cures the earworm. It starts out:

I’m riding shotgun down the avalanche,
Tumbling and falling down the avalanche.
So be quiet tonight, the stars shine bright
On this mountain of new fallen snow.
But I will raise up my voice into the void
You have left me nowhere to go.

This seems like a song about inevitability, in ability to control events. As far as I know, an avalanche can’t usually be controlled, other than perhaps the practice in Colorado and other states of using a shotgun to trigger one at safer and more alert moments. The song goes on:

Sometimes you make me lose my will to live
And just become a beacon for your soul.
The past is stronger than my will to forgive,
Forgive you or myself, I don’t know.

I’m riding shotgun down the avalanche,
Tumblin’ and fallin’ down the avalanche….

Words to songs have always been meaningful to me, and I probably have the lyrics to hundreds of songs lodged in my brain. Somehow this song reminds me of certain lessons that life keeps trying to teach me with mixed success:

• I only have control over my own reactions.
• Sometimes helping is robbery.
• You can’t fix everything, no matter how good you are, and sometimes inaction is the best choice. But sometimes not. How do you know? Reach down into your heart and do what it tells you.

The avalanche is an apt metaphor. Stevie Nicks wrote a much-loved and much-covered song in her early twenties called “Landslide.” She wrote the song in Aspen, Colorado on the night before her dad's operation at the Mayo Clinic, at a time that for many reasons was a turning point for her career and her life. She had a lot going on--and it all converged at once in this song that questioned whether she could really make it to the next stage in the career and the future she had envisioned. She ended up deciding to stay with her music – and three months later on New Year’s Eve Fleetwood Mac called her.

She says about the song: “I realized then that everything could tumble, and when you’re in Colorado…you think avalanche. It means the whole world could tumble around us, and the landslide would bring you down…when you’re in that kind of snow-covered surrounding place, you don’t just go out and yell, because the whole mountain could come down on you.”

Landslide

by Stevie Nicks

I took my love, I took it down.
Climbed a mountain and I turned around.
And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills
‘Til the landslide brought me down.

Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?
Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons in my life?

Well, I’ve been afraid of changing
‘Cause I’ve built my life around you.
But times make you bolder, even children get older,
And I’m getting older too.

Oh, take my love, take it down.
Aha, climb a mountain and turn around.
And if you see my reflection in the snow covered hills
Well, the landslide will bring it down.

And if you see my reflection in the snow covered hills
Well, the landslide will bring it down.