Song Description

When Chloe goes to tell Lonnie that she is leaving, he offers to go with her, but she just brushes the hair out of his eyes. "You don't really want to go," she says. "Besides, I don't know where I'm going." After she's gone, Lonnie just sits in the barn holding his guitar, not playing anything. He studies the woodgrain of the rafters and the roofboards, which seem to hold all the music they've ever played all through the years, as if the wood absorbed the sound waves like water. Walking across the snowy barnyard in the dark, the arctic wind rattling through the dead oak leaves still clinging to the branches, he sees the lights of Chloe's farm across the fields. There is no light in her room.

Lyrics

Chloe tells me that she must go,
leaving all her people and she don't know
where she will go or even what she figures she'll do.

She just says she needs to leave this place,
roam the world a bit to find a better space
for her to grow and find out who she's meant to be.

She won't say it.
She won't tell you now.
She won't go there.
She won't tell you how...
...and then she sings it....

Lonnie.... Lonnie....
the wind is calling and I can't refuse its call.
Lonnie.... Lonnie....
Can't you hear the wind and whispers at all?

Wind and whispers, I don't know why
Chloe always listens to the midnight sky,
and she goes walking out where no one else will go.

Frogs are singing and owls glide,
dragonflies are feasting while the whitetails hide,
and the river flows--and, flowing, it knows.

Sometimes midnights she greets the moon,
her nightgown feels like mothwings in the murmuring June,
and she goes wandering while the wind blows through trees.

She goes barefoot through the dewy grass,
toes like lips quenching her thirst so vast
while listening to the soft tongues of leaves.
credits