Girl On A Bridge

 From the album The First And Last Reunion,  this is a weird one that me and Robert Muncie thought up. We were trying to write a story song and try to get away from the usual life observations and failed love songs that we are famous for and came up something like Dickey Lee's Laurie (strange things happen in this world) but with a bit of Rod Serling's Night Gallery type of melodrama.  The story goes, naive driver picks up a cold and lonely girl on a bridge on a forgotten road and tells of a story of eloping with her boyfriend and somehow goes down in a murky river, she survives but he doesn't, but she wants to go back home. So the good Samaritan takes her back to an an old rundown country estates to which her dad freaks out and tells the do gooder that she's dead.  To which our hero turns around and the girl that was with him disappears. *cue up old pipe organ*

Where did she go?  Back to the haunted bridge to wait for the next do gooder to try to take her back home.  In some ways, this song didn't turn out that bad when we did the take on March 20, 1993 at the old Broadcast Manor on the SW side of Cedar Rapids, actually a duplex to which my brother had one side of the house and I had the other side. Which worked out pretty good since I could play drums and continue making music.  We lived at that house from 1992 to 1997.

The song clocked at 8 and half minutes but was edited down to 7 minutes and faded out at the end. 

Girl On A Bridge (Smith/Muncie)

Met a girl right on a bridge
Looking so cold and all alone
So I asked "where are you going"?
All she said was to take me home
She told me she was to be married
But their parents did not agree
So they eloped and after that
The bridge, the river, things went blank

But she'll never find the answer
To the question that she asked
She hung herself on a golden thread from the past
Now she'll never go home again

Wreckage down in the river
Muddy waters covers up the rust
He's down in there and turned to dust
Still she waits under angry skies
So I drove her to a country estate
Enshrouded in gray and seen better days
Paranoid man says "you don't understand"
Her spirit haunts me cause now she's dead

And the girl disappears into the night
She returns back to the scene of the crime
Another soul will give her another ride
Even in death as in life she'll never realize
That you can't go home again
No you'll never go home again.

C1993  Townedger Music Emporium