Lyric Analysis: Willie Nelson's "Living In The Promiseland"

Let's do this:

Give us your tired, your weak
And we will make them strong
Bring us your far off song
And we will sing along
Leave us your broken dreams
We’ll give them time to mend
There’s still a lot of love
Living in the Promiseland

Living in the Promiseland
Our dreams are made of steel
The prayer of every one
Is to know how freedom feels
There is a winding road
Across shifting sand
And room for everyone
Living in the Promiseland

So they came with such a sad eye
Nameless woman, faceless child
Like a bad dream
Till there was no room at all
No place to place to run
And no place to fall

Give us your daily bread
We have no shoes to wear
No place to call our home
Only this cross to bear
We are the multitudes
Lend us a helping hand
Is there no love anymore
Living in the Promiseland

Living in the Promiseland
Our dreams are made of steels
The prayer of every man
Know how freedom feels
There is a winding road
Across the shifting sand
And room for everyone
Living in the Promiseland
And room for everyone
Living in the Promiseland

Simple structure, simple rhyme scheme, simple, simple, simple. And eloquent. Powerful. Willie wants to make a statement, he wants to urge us to live up to our lofty ideals. He wants us to welcome the outcast and show love to everyone.

How best to do that? Well, many songsmiths would immediately climb aboard the bully pulpit. Not our Willie. He starts off paraphrasing the Statue of Liberty. He pats us on the back. This is a patriotic song! It's a song that talks about how great we are! Yeehaw! We sing with Willie, we get misty-eyed. Why, that's us all right. Americans. Christians. Good ol' boys (and girls).

But wait. The first two stanzas are what we SAID. Which caused people to actually come (see stanza three). And then what happened? Not quite what was promised, Willie says. These nameless masses ask "Is there no love anymore?"

Now we understand. Willie isn't praising us for past actions; he is calling us to action NOW. He sings the triumphant chorus again to close out the song. We're forced to sing along, and in doing so, we are giving our commitment speech. We're saying, "Yeah, I want to live up to this ideal. I want to be this kind of person."

Now, if Willie had began the song with "They came with such a sad eye," he would have lost a lot of power. Here comes a sad song about foreigners. Yada, yada, yada. The effect is greater since he praised us for our ideals first. So the formula for this "message" song is:

1. Praise them for their ideals
2. Tell a story that illustrates how they are failing to live up to those ideals (a story here is effective -- he is "showing" us we've fallen short, rather than simply "telling" us.
3. Praise the ideals again, which are now convicting us, spuring us to act on them.

Willie Nelson, of course, is coming to Louisville on the 29th as part of Bob Dylan's summer road show (along with the Greencards).