» Educated Man

I wrote this song in my early twenties one summer day in the family room in the bottom of our townhouse in Richmond, Virginia.  I was home from college and I was trying to emulate the Beatles.  The first line of the song seemed to me to be something McCartney would have written.

The title and the song itself was inspired by my previous year's experience in a turn-of-the-century British literature course taught by John Crow (who in the second semester through an independent study on Joseph Conrad taught me most of what I know today about critical thinking and logical writing). We had studied Henry Adam's book The Education of Henry Adams, in which he argued that before the industrial age, an educated man could actually expect to know most things about everything.  Adams was among the first to recognize that we were entering an age of specialization, in which it would no longer be possible to know almost everything.  These thoughts together with Plato's famous quotation, "True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing", inspired the song.

Bryce doesn't sing the next line about the "lines upon your face" correctly, but he gets all the credit for the incredible arrangement he brought to this song.  It is interesting to me to hear my own angst being poured out through another teen's voice thirty years after I wrote it.

I hope someday that Crosley Court will also record the song I wrote inspired by the line, "Do you ever see what walks behind you late at night?" That song is called "At Night".

Note: image is from http://media.photobucket.com/image/scary%20night/Baron_Jempolers/scary_graveyard_at_night_1280x1024.jpg?o=5.