She came on the flood in a wave of hopeless lust
My animal senses felt the same way about her
She came to me first in the mid 90s – that first stanza
I had just got my Telecaster back and was thinking along the lines of Leon Russell
Rachel – reach out
Restore my faith in human nature
She’s a fine woman to love
Talk about déjà vu
You gave me something I could never do
The chorus came then too – a series of words that spilled the beans on the song
We had an old car and I managed to hang the second verse around the time its brakes gave out
She took my car and backed away
She could go far but not in that wreck
I told her about the brakes and the chances that she takes
But she put it in gear and she drive straight
After that I couldn’t find the words to complete it but I played it to the band
It’s floated in and out of our set ever since
This raunchy down home blues/soul fest where I’m making up the words as I go along to half the song
I kept up the charade for twenty years or more
And now we have come to record it and I have to finally finish it
It’s not like I haven’t tried to nail it down over the years
I just couldn’t come up with lines worthy of that series of chords
A song that exists before it is fully realised
She was ready to escape from a previous life
And I was so wired it was tragic
Over the last few weeks I’ve been mulling over what to write – the way I do for this weekly story
Something clicked one night and I introduced the animus to counteract the animal and the idea of trading clothes
She wound up on the bus like it was the end of us
My Animus howled for her and just closed down
We found that we’d swapped clothes and I was naked to the world
So I went back to the life she’d taken with her
In our recording of the song we have built up layers of guitars, keyboards, violins, slide, piano, mouth harp and now vocals
It sounds like nothing we have ever done before
Someone asked me who she was
I know who she is now
She is Rachel the song
Rachel – reach out
Restore my faith in human nature
She’s a fine woman to love
Talk about déjà vu
You gave me something I could never do
The Ghost of Electricity – War Stories by Jon McLeary is a new initiative at Off The Tracks, a series of stories and reflections from painter, writer and musician Jon McLeary