Music + lyrics by Peter King
5:54 | :30 soundbite
This song is old — older than I want to admit. It was written under the formidable spell of Joni Mitchell LPs like “Hejirah,” and it has way more lyrics than the songs I write now. I wasn’t sure if it belonged on a CD with newer, much jazzier tunes, but I decided that it still holds up quite well.
“Idaho” grew out of a road trip I took with a girlfriend to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I only dimly remember it now, but we must have played that old time-waster of a game where you ask each other “What's the capital of Mississippi?” and so on.
I wrote “Idaho" about a year later, when I was “single” again and finishing my undergraduate degree at Temple University. That little game we had played began to take on a bigger meaning in my imagination. I remember obsessively writing and rewriting the lyrics while I worked my way through school as an all-night psychiatric aide at a private hospital. I’d go to school when my shift ended in the morning, drive home after class, tinker with the chords and melody, and then catch a couple of hours’ sleep.
The stuff your body would let you get away with back in the day … :
Verse:
We had stopped in a store by some migrant shacks
I noticed the okra and greens on the racks
Brushed shoulders with workers just back from the fields
While the grocery clerk eyed us coldly
You sat on the driver’s side studying the map
French fries in wax paper perched on your lap
Saying, “What is this sand in the thermos cap?”
And “Betcha can’t tell me Idaho's capital”
And fueled by all of the places we’d been
The wheels of imagining started to spin
Chorus:
I saw rivers and mountains and clear northern air
Filling our lungs and sweeping our hair
Three days in your beat-up Corolla
If we were that crazy
That’s how far it is
To the capital of Idaho
Verse:
We had camped in a tent on a rocky floor
Starlight flooded the Georgia shore
At midnight the breakers’ muffled roar
Seemed to mourn for the wreck of your marriage
As we spoke in the lantern light’s sputtering glow
And you told of the memories that wouldn’t let go
Sometimes in your heart a distance would grow
And sometimes you thought you could love me
Then the flickering Coleman
Started to fade
And out of the silence
You said, “I'm afraid”
Chorus:
And I said, Rivers and mountains and clear northern air
Filling our lungs and sweeping our hair
As far as our love can take us
If you take the risk
That’s how far it is
To the capital of Idaho
Verse:
When you kissed at my shoulders
My blood would leap
And my pulse could quicken
Just watching you sleep
And a long conversation with you hit deep
Left me feelin' that somebody knew me
But the flame that burned for us
Died in the night
And the visions that came to me
Faded from sight
You said the chemistry just wasn’t right
Yeah but I think that it was the timing
And I hear that you're travelin’
With somebody new
But sometimes I still get
These pictures of you
Chorus:
And rivers and mountains and clear northern air
Filling our lungs and sweeping our hair
As far as your thoughts are from me
When you make love to him
That's how far it is
To the capital of Idaho