"Then I'll come on back to Boulder Skies"

Songwriter: Craig Fuller
Performers: Pure Prairie League
Album: Bustin' Out (1972)
When I heard it for the first time: 2007, along with the rest of the Bustin' Out album.

Craig Fuller must either have been stoned out of his mind when he wrote "Boulder Skies"; or totally sober and totally smitten with SOMEONE - so smitten that the song seems to have just materialised, fully formed, into his consciousness. His voice sounds curiously tripsied, chilled, and stoned, floating dream-like in some parallel world, where only he and SHE are fixed points; other people, though they do exist, are just backdrop - they merely float in and out.

When I first heard "Boulder Skies", I was impatient and wanted the song to pick up pace, DO SOMETHING, find some focal point. I was wrong to expect. The song has absolutely no pace, no edge, and no high point. It is an ethereal dream. To like the song, either you inhabit its dreamland, and see HER; or you don't understand the song at all.

It is about someone, for sure, but specific or not, mythic or real, we would hardly benefit by knowing.

For a long time, I searched for videos of this beautiful, forlorn, lovesick song on the tube, and did not find any. The video I've posted here became available very recently and is the only one - you will not be able to find another.

****************************************************************************

Bustin' Out is a curious album. Long ago, I heard that it was Pure Prairie League's best-ever album. After listening to songs from each of the Pure Prairie League albums, perhaps, this does not seem quite true; the material is strong enough on each of them. Bustin' Out is, however, Pure Prairie League's 'Craig Fuller' album - of the 10 tracks, he wrote about 8 of them; and then left the band before the next album Two Lane Highway (1975). Fuller's songs on Bustin' Out seem curiously misplaced, dreamy and mysterious, tinged with emotion.

Taken along with "Amie (Falling in and out of Love)", "Boulder Skies" is the high point of Bustin' Out. It's a simple lyric, though, strike where you will, it gives way to deeper worlds, loaded with colours, nuances and flower-power era 'oddness'. The country-rock feel of the instrumentation is also tinged with a Haight-Ashbury sunny, dewy-eyed, golden-hair feel. It's amazing that the guitars and piano actually manage to brilliantly capture the aching emotions of Fuller's lyric here:

Sew your skirt lace out of time
While I write the words to rhyme
Just what I am thinkin'... just what I should say
If I have to go I'd rather stay

Colorado canyon girl could set me free
Brown eyes in the mornin' lookin' back at me
And just for that one moment... you're all that I see
Searchin' for some other place to be

More than anyone can try I hope you'll see that I belong
Standin' right before your eyes
If you can take the time to find where I went wrong
Then I think you just might realize

So sew your skirt lace and I'll go home
But not quite where I started from
And take it so you'll feel it... and take it so you'll know
Take one long last look before I go

More than anyone can try I hope you'll see that I belong
Standin' right before your eyes
And when you've had the time to see it's been too long
Then I'll come on back to Boulder Skies