The best songs, I think, are written out of a pure feeling that comes over a person, and it pours out spontaneously in a completely unplanned way into a song. That doesn't mean that the writer necessarily knows what it's about at the time, though it might be that some of the meanings become more clear to him or her with the singing of the song as time goes by. Other people will find their own personal meanings in it, and new meanings will be found. That's good. The song arose out of powerful feelings of some kind, and it engenders powerful feelings in the listeners...if they are susceptible to it.

If not...(shrug)   Well, then they'll tune into something else instead.

I think the greatest songs are written by something far beyond the writer himself, something way beyond the boundaries of a human being. To let that happen one has to either be quite unaware it's happening...or one has to consciously surrender to something greater. It's surrender, either way...either conscious or unconscious. The song writes itself. The so-called writer is the scribe...his voice is the instrument. He becomes the instrument of what people in a far more worshipful and courtly age than the present one might have called the Allmighty or the Great Spirit.

You have to be without prejudice or judgement in such moments of surrender, seems to me.

And how common is that?

Pancho and Lefty is a great song. Doesn't matter whether or not TVZ had a clue what it was about when or after he wrote it. Does it resonate somehow with the life of Pancho Villa? Yeah, probably, just the way a wave that bounces off the shores of New York will one day kiss the sands of France. It's inevitable. The wave, like the song, is moved by something greater than prejudice or judgement. It goes where it will and arrives in its own time, seen or unseen.

"The cloak and dagger dangles,
Madams light the candles.
In ceremonies of the horsemen,
Even the pawn must hold a grudge.
Statues made of match sticks,
Crumble into one another,
My love winks, she does not bother,
She knows too much to argue or to judge." - Bob Dylan