A Place To Call My Own
Written by Tommy Shaw
Lead Vocals by Tommy Shaw
Hold the lamplight to the night
See the empty streets
Rolling out of sight
Turn a deaf ear to the din
Ignore the hunger pangs
Bundle up against the wind
Still I believe
Someone waits for me
A place to call my own
Somewhere to be from
A shelter from the storm
Where I'll be safe and warm
A future built on stone
A place to call my own
And once there was a time
I had no fear at all
None that I recall
No future there to taunt
No history to haunt me
No monsters in the wall
Still I believe
Someone waits for me
Oh, a place to call my own
Somewhere to be from
A shelter from the storm
Where I'll be safe and warm
Of wood and bricks and stone
Oh, a place to call my own
Somewhere to be from
A shelter from the storm
Where I'll be safe and warm
A future built on stone
A place to call my own
Interpretation
Here it is, in Tommy's own words, from a 1998 interview with Matthew Wardlaw for Music's Bottom Line in Cleveland:
"...when I got divorced in 1993, it happened right at the beginning of the Damn Yankees Don’t Tread tour. Suddenly all my stuff was in a Ryder truck packed up in New York and driven out to California and put in a storage place somewhere near the Burbank airport. I was on the road and I was homeless for over three months. It was like high class homelessness because I had money and I always had a roof over my head, it just wasn’t mine, I didn’t have an address. It was funny for a couple of months, but after a while it was like 'ha ha ha, I’m homeless'. 'Where do you live?' 'On the Damn Yankees bus, what hotel are we in tonight?' Then I started looking at people who really were homeless. It’s not that you want to be homeless. You want an address. Somebody says 'well, where can I find you?' it’s like 'you can’t!', somewhere to be from. So I wrote if from that perspective. It was a lofty homelessness for me, but that was enough!"
Lyrics printed with the permission of Tommy Shaw and with the generous assistance of Kim Ouellette.
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