Four Winds

**Four Winds** is the second track on the album Cassadaga. It was released as the first single from the album on March 6, 2007, as the title track of the  Four Winds EP. A music video was created for this song.

## Lyrics

Your class, your caste, your country, sect, your name or your tribe

There's people always dying, trying to keep 'em alive

There's bodies decomposing in containers tonight

In an abandoned building where

The squatters made a mural of a Mexican girl

With fifteen cans of spray paint in a chemical swirl

She's standing in the ashes at the end of the world

Four winds blowing through her hair

But when great Satan's gone

The whore of Babylon

She just can't sustain

The pressure where it's placed

She caves

The Bible's blind, the Torah's deaf, the Qu'ran is mute

If you burned them all together, you'd get close to the truth still

They're poring over Sanskrit under Ivy League moons

While shadows lengthen in the sun

Cast on a school of meditation built to soften the times

And hold us at the center while the spiral unwinds

It's knocking over fences, crossing property lines

Four winds cry until it comes

And it's the sum of man

Slouching towards Bethlehem

A heart just can't contain

All of that empty space

It breaks

It breaks

It breaks

Well, I went back by rented Cadillac and company jet

Like a newly orphaned refugee retracing my steps

All the way to Cassadaga to commune with the dead

They said, "You'd better look alive"

And now it's off to old Dakota where a genocide sleeps

In the Black Hills, the Badlands, the calloused east

I buried my ballast, I made my peace

Heard four winds leveling the pines

But when great Satan's gone

The whore of Babylon

She just can't remain

With all that outer space

She breaks

She breaks

She caves

She caves

## Credits

* Conor Oberst - guitar, voice
* Mike Mogis - guitar, mandolin, 12-string
* Nate Walcott - organ, electric piano
* Dan McCarthy - bass
* Jason Boesel - drums
* Anton Patzner - piano
* Maria Taylor - voice
* Andy LeMaster - voice

## Comments from Bright Eyes on this song

* (On The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats) "It's a powerful poem, commenting on the 'progression' of a society. It is still relevant today. It's a reminder of what can happen when we let chaos take its course and let everything fall apart. 'The falcon cannot hear the falconer.' The poem gives the picture that many of the ideas from Buddhism, Christianity and Islam lead to the inevitable Armageddon. That's very interesting. Religions have great influence on how people think, how their reality is affected, but they also lead to despair and hopelessness, according to the poem.'
* In the song, Oberst equates Armageddon with the departure of "great Satan'. "That 'great Satan' can be interpreted in different ways. It can refer to America, but it can also refer to humanity itself. What we are currently doing cannot be sustained. Everyone knows that the problems facing the world, climate change, overpopulation, peak oil and chemical weapons, have the potential to cause Armageddon. Anyone who recognizes that knows that we cannot go on like this." (machine translated from a De Groene Amsterdammer interview)
* "This is the single for the record, and the way we select our singles is we look at all the songs and we see which ones are under five minutes and then we decide which ones have a quick enough BPM and that's how we select it, so that's how we got to this being our single. It has a lot of words, it's almost like a rap song.. and I like the vocal harmonies, Maria Taylor and Andy LeMaster singing with me... the vocal harmonies are probably my favorite part of the song." (Track by track Cassadaga)

## Notes and references

* 'Slouching towards Bethlehem' is a quote from the W. B. Yeats poem *The Second Coming*. Joan Didion's 1968 collection of essays is named after the same quote.

## Sources

* LP liner notes on Discogs

**B-sides:** "Reinvent the Wheel" • "Smoke Without Fire" • "Stray Dog Freedom" • "Cartoon Blues" • "Tourist Trap" • "Endless Entertainment" • "Susan Miller Rag"