Manic Monday ~ On a Bus to St. Cloud

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OH, how I searched for an inspiration for this Manic Monday!! I was not about to do any scientific explanation about those fluffy white puffs that float in the sky. I even found some Native American Lore about clouds. I looked for poetry – I even tried to write a poem. Nothing felt right until I found this. It is an obscure song that Trisha Yearwood put on one of her albums back in 1995.

On a bus to St. Cloud, Minnesota
I thought I saw you there
With the snow falling down around you
Like a silent prayer.
And once on a street in New York City
With the jazz and the sin in the air
And once on a cold L.A. freeway
Going nowhere.

And it's strange, but it's true
I was sure it was you
Just a face in the crowd
On a bus to St. Cloud

In a church in downtown New Orleans
I got down on my knees and prayed
And I wept in the arms of Jesus
For the choice you made.
We were just gettin' to the good part
Just gettin' past the mystery
Oh, and it's just like you, it's just like you
To disagree.

And it's strange but it's true
You just slipped out of view
Like a face in the crowd
On a bus to St. Cloud

And you chase me like a shadow
And you haunt me like a ghost
And I hate you some, and I love you some
But I miss you most...

On a bus to St. Cloud, Minnesota
I thought I saw you there
With the snow falling down around you
Like a silent prayer.

The song was written by Gretchen Peters. The melody is quite haunting. After choosing this song, I continued to search the web to see if I could find out what Gretchen Peters had in her brain when she wrote it. I was very surprised to find what she had intended in her lyrics.

• Maps are great for evoking images for a songwriter like Gretchen Peters, who wrote this song… "I can just get lost in a map, very easily," says Peters. "It's like a fresh new well, looking at a map." This song came about from a road trip she was planning out West or to the upper Midwest towards the West. "I was thinking about going up that way, and I saw the name St. Cloud, and I just thought, what an evocative name…” Peters envisioned the song as being about a person talking about someone who committed suicide, but in order to allow the listener more freedom for interpretation, she was deliberately vague with the lyrics. She says, "In order to get to the emotional space that you need to be, I don't think that necessarily means that you have to be explicit, or put every detail in. In fact, I think songs are better when they are a little bit more murky, or fuzzy around the edges. Let the listener participate, too, in other words. Let them put their story in.”

My personal interpretation is a bit less morose. Like Peters said in her interview, her lyrics give the listener flexibility to incorporate his/her own story into the lyrics. The picture story that ran through my imagination was that of someone running away from a failed relationship.

I suppose it all depends on how deeply you read into the lyrics. It’s that way with anything in life. What you get out of it, depends on how much effort you put into it.

Amen… and thanks for stopping by.