Thom Moore lyrics and inspirations Tom-Fool

TOM-FOOL

Here's what to do: if you

think you're a fool—keep rolling;

God loves the fool, they say,

so keep on rolling…

Roll till the break of dawn;

roll till you can't roll on.

Winning is what you want, so roll on.

The Fool's going to roll away,

he thinks it's his lucky day;

his mind was never strong, anyway.

Mind was never strong, anyway.

Bring on the night,

throw down the fool his lifeline.

It's the full of the moon, and the

mountain is there for climbing.

At the top of the hill she waits,

the queen of love and fate; he's

bound to find out in spades

where he's wrong.

Yes: the Fool's going to climb that hill,

do what a tom-fool will,

maybe he won't be long on the hill.

Maybe he won't be long

maybe he won't be long, on the hill.

Fool with a tune: he's

caught by the moon and crying.

Fool with a sigh: he

probably thinks he's dying.

But that plaint will turn around:

funny old thing, that sound:

blues bring love to town, after all.

Yes, the Fool's going to sing along:

he thinks it's a happy song.

Maybe he's not so wrong, after all.

Maybe he's not so wrong,

maybe he's not so wrong:

maybe he's not so wrong, after all.

After the hiatus of 2001-2002 that I described in the material accompanying track No. 1, Lad No Longer, and that song had come tumbling out of me willy-nilly, I quickly found myself coming up with another confessional song, this one a redux of my song about re-acquiring some kind of faith by being (rather foolishly) on the top of a mountain in Ireland in the middle of one windy night. That song was Still Believing, which was the first track on the Midnight Well album of 1977. Despite the self-denigratory tone of both songs, I valued and still value the experience of that night as the most important of my life ... giving me a certainty about my insights that meant I could avoid consideration of things like commercial success as a validation for what I do. This certainty irritates any number of people who regard it as my excuse for a whole bunch of lollygagging and inattention to the details of commercial success, not least a lot of visibly hard work ... I used to tell myself that, as a one-time Catholic, I could bring myself to pray for the ability to write songs, a skill that had eluded me until I was nearly 26 and studying for my master’s degree in Slavonic languages at the University of California. As a Catholic – lapsed or not – I was too deeply instilled with the shame of asking God for any kind of financial reward. That was just beyond the pale; think of all the starving Armenians/Chinese/Africans/etc. This is probably the biggest reason (well, along with the laziness, etc.) for the stops and starts of my ‘career’: am I a Russian translator and interpreter ... or am I a songwriter ... or am I an English-language theorist and teacher and student? I belong to the Irish Interpreters’ and Translators’ Association, a full professional member; I belong to the Irish Music Rights Organisation, likewise full professional member; and I taught English grammar and punctuation at Merit College in Van Nuys, California, for seven years, and then English syntax and intonation at the Udmurt National University in Izhevsk, Russia, for another three years. Go figure, as the people of Brooklyn are said to say. Etymological note: Tom-Fool was the original of the phrase that is most commonly used in the United States as ‘damn fool’, denoting someone with little or no common sense; but it survives in all dialects of English in the word ‘tomfoolery’. Nuff said.