words/music by Jimmy Webb • arranged/performed by Doug Howell
© Universal – Polygram International Pub Inc.
Favorite version: Jimmy Webb, Land’s End, 1974
love is a glass of wine
it‘s balanced on the siderail of a ship
across the sea at midnight come
it may not last the daylight come
and the trip is long
and the waves are strong
but then again, it might be up there forever
I’ve heard of birds that never touch the land, but
sleep on the winds
and if untouched by someone’s careless hand
asleep on the winds
our love might last
until the journey ends
alive
alive
our lives are just bubbles of time
they’re rainbow colored and they’re
they’re shining in the sun
they drift above the treetops now
in danger if the breeze drops somehow
and darlin’, that’s all it would take
and yet we threaten not to break
and you know we could be up here forever
I’ve heard of birds that never touch the land, but
sleep on the winds
and if untouched by someone’s careless hand
asleep on the winds
our lives might last until the love begins
so stay alive
and let me try as hard as you do
to stay alive
please, let me be as much alive as you
I’ll try
alive
alive
Notes
I’ve always loved this Jimmy Webb song, and it is one of his most unique, released 50 years ago this year. It opens with a long, instrumental tone poem called “Land’s End,” which is also the title of the 1974 album the song closes, his fifth. According to Jimmy’s memoir, The Cake and the Rain, the writing and recording of “Asleep on the Wind” was a gargantuan effort. The recording took place at the Music Centre in Wembley and included a huge cast of musicians: six guitarists, three drummers, three grand pianos, 50-odd string players, a raft of woodwinds and horns, and on and on. I can’t imagine what the enormous undertaking would have cost in today’s dollars—even without the extensive mixing sessions that followed, during which time the project was brought back to A&M Studios in California, with Joni Mitchell’s engineer taking over the technical duties. Webb’s memoir also reveals that the album was produced during a period of great upheaval in his personal and professional life. And that it was the last project he finished before a near-fatal drug overdose.
The song was on my list of possibles when I first recorded Jimmy & Me, but somehow it seemed a bit too grand for me to tackle just then, so it didn’t make the final cut. However, when I was pondering which of the leftover songs I could record for the expanded Revisited album, its very grandness now seemed to make it more appropriate. It was a song of consequence, a song that seemed worth all the extra effort of rereleasing the album. And like “How Quickly,” which I released as a single in 2021, “Asleep on the Wind” had also been covered very, very few times. Armed with those facts (plus the encouragement of my UK Jimmy buddy, Andy Caseley, whose opinion I had requested), I moved ahead.
The message of the song strikes me as a little more philosophical than some of the other songs on the album, highlighting the vissicitudes of romantic love as well as its fundamental importance in our lives, and taking the flying metaphor present in several of the other songs—think of the line “I can’t forget you yet, for whatever that is worth, and sometimes I think I’m never coming back to earth”—to new, soaring heights, with birds that sleep on the wind, never touching the land.
The grave risk, the wonder and sublime value of the love journey are all center stage, set against a fateful backdrop of wind, waves, storms and faraway destinations. This iconic struggle, with its obvious connection to the personal predicaments of our individual searches for lasting love relationships, makes this song a profound statement that seems to include the messages of all the other songs in one, desperate-but-forever-hopeful cry.
In fact, from the second verse, the search for love becomes a struggle for life itself, a life that is every bit as precarious as that search: “our lives might last until the love begins / so stay alive.” Staying alive is something the singer “tries hard to do,” so, God-willing, he might survive long enough to discover that love.
For all these reasons, it made perfect sense to me to add this song as the last in my Jimmy collection. I hope it will inspire you to sail into the wind, and soar.
Music Notes
I added a long intro of my own to this arrangement, with thematic material based on the song’s melody and with the haunting image of a ship sailing a stormy sea in my mind. So in that way, it tracks with Jimmy’s own version.
Many thanks to my amazing guitar buddy, Daniel Leonhardt, for somehow knowing just what the song needed and adding his expert licks throughout. And also to David C. Glaser for adding his clear tenor to the song’s last “alive.”
I’m also grateful to the audiophiles of freesound.org, who provided the sound effects I used to help establish its cinematic scope: joyvel for “Wind Chimes…”; Department64 for “Gentle Thunder…”; Geenburg for “Wind and Sea 02”; CGEffex for “Ships Bell”; RSilveira_88 for “Seagull 05”; juskiddink for “Seagulls close-up.”
Leave a Reply