The Ghosts That Haunt Me - The Wounded Circus - Mark Brown

The other day I posted about my song “The Rain,” which was the first song of my imaginary demo album The Ghosts That Haunt Me. Today I bring you the song “The Wounded Circus.”

I was living in Orlando, FL after my big breakup in Chicago. (The breakup being what led me to write the aforementioned song “The Rain.”) I was in the process of pulling my life together and I remember standing in an aisle at the grocery store, unable to move and just staring at the food thinking, “What do I buy? What should I cook? What the hell do I do?”

There were days when I had no idea where my next meal was coming from. Seriously. It was a rough period of my life.

I thought back to when I was happiest and it was when I was at ACT in San Francisco four years earlier. I loved living in San Francisco, loved acting everyday, and the program there was based on centering yourself and living in the moment. It was glorious.

I had driven my car from NJ to CA to get to ACT. (If you’ve never driving cross country I highly recommend it.) I would drive for hours and have no idea what I had been thinking about. Occassionaly lyrics would pop into my head. One line that made its way into my head was “Motorcars and movie stars, pictures of Elvis running in and out of my head like a wounded circus.”

I had no idea what it meant but there it was.

As I ruminated about that time that lyric drifted back into my head. As I was laying out a plan for my new found life, the lyric kept coming back to me. It ended up leading me to the song “The Wounded Circus,” a song about wanting to move on, wanting to grab it all, and yet still being broken-down.

So again I grabbed my guitar, harmonica, and 4-track recorder and recorded the song in my living room. I slapped a little reverb on it and this is what I came up with.