I wrote this piece for the 2012 Three Twelve album, Something Begun, but we decided it was too similar in feel to the "Still / This Tree" diptych we'd already committed to, so we saved "Before Me" for a later project.  (Oh well.)  The piece is much less "mainstream tonal" than most of my other works, and in fact a diligent observer will notice some Hauer-esque melodic retrogrades and inversions, that help to give the piece its unsettled consistency.  Don't worry too much about the meter changes, either—as long as the pianist and the vocalist can hit the downbeats more or less together, the piece works just fine.

Lyrics

The sun is high as I step out of the wood,
and shad­ows that stretched long this morn­ing have gone.
The grass is tall, and it slows my cer­tain step
as insects fling them­selves from shel­ter to flight.
There now before me, a wall of ancient stone climbs to the sky.
Weath­ered and crum­bling, these stones stood long before my heart began to beat.
A door­way yawns where great tim­bers hinged ago,
pro­tect­ing sacred space with­in and with­out.
The roof is gone: lich­ened beams across the floor.
The walls that held it, now unbur­dened, stand tall.
Some­how, above me, the sun, trapped by these walls, moves ever on,
cross­ing hori­zons as one light sets, and in its place, a mil­lion shine.
Some­how with­in me, the wan­der­er finds home here in the dark.
I set my pack down, and there we stand, out­side of time,
those stones and I.

©2011 David M. Glas­gow (ASCAP)