Dancin’ Moon Songcast Ep. 34 Signs (2020 Tiny Desk Contest Entry Song!)

Featured song from 2010's Letting the Sunlight Back In LP 

Signs

I went down to New Mexico
with my father and my little girl
it was unreal and it was dreamlike
it was like another world of enchantment
--just like they say on the signs.

It was rainy and it was gray all across the Rockies
I drove the pickup truck my father slept a lot--
he’s getting older now, so am I, so am I
And my daughter, well, she isn’t little anymore…
she’s seventeen and riding behind these two old men
in the back seat with her headphones
and we’re stopping once again for a bathroom
and another cup of coffee.

And my father knows how painful life can be
so we just talk about the signs we pass along the way
but he reaches across the front seat to put his hand on my neck
and he rubs it, just like he did when I was just twenty-one
and my fiancée broke up with me and I was on the run from myself,
or at least who I thought I was gonna be,
who I thought I was gonna be…

So we drop off my daughter with her sleeping bag and her guitar
for two weeks at camp, and there’s laughing kids and there’s cars
and there’s parents and they’re huggin’ their children
and the sun finally begins to shine…
And we are what we are, not what we were gonna be
and the road stretches from bathroom to cup of coffee
and my father and I, we trade off driving and sleeping
and he rubs my neck, and I rub his
and we can see all the peaks this time
all back through Colorado--
it’s so full of color
--just like they say on all the signs

it’s so full of color
--just like they say on all the signs,
on all the signs.

 Also appears on...

Click Here to watch the
2020 Tiny Desk Concert Entry,
Signs by Scott Simpson