Tear It Down

a folk song about destroying stuff

Written by Bob Wiegers

When I kick off this song at a show, I’ll say something like: “This one might be about the patriarchy, or the oligarchy, or just an old building. You can decide.” And then the banjo gets going and we’re off:

When the wall came down
It gave a mighty groan
Dust and dirt all ’round
Exposing steel and stone

An old brick building
Eight stories tall
Piece by piece they’ve come
To make it fall

Tear it down, tear it down
Cant keep the old around
There’s no room in this town
So tear it down. (repeat)

There’s machines and men
Come to tear away
What machines and men
Built back in the day

There’s a new one now
It’s just four blocks down
Nine stories high
Finest site in town

(chorus)

Take it down to dirt
You knew it wouldnt last
We’ve no further use
For relics of the past

Leave no trace behind
Pave it over, all black
Sometimes to move ahead
We’ve got to turn our back

(chorus)

This is one of my oldest songs, written sometime around 2008, in my first major phase of songwriting, and pretty much the only one I still play from that era. It is my most bluegrassy tune, although I’m hardly a strictly bluegrasser.

Here’s a crude home recording from back then:

I remember writing this song in the corporate cafeteria at Unum Insurance in Chattanooga TN, where I worked as a computer programmer. The large windows overlooked much of the city, and down the block they were taking a wrecking ball to the old Electric Power Board building. I don’t think it was a particularly remarkable building besides being old, tall, and narrow, and I don’t think they took a literal wrecking ball due to its proximity to other buildings. In my memory, they literally tore it down with huge excavators or something. It was fascinating to watch during the lunch breaks at my mundane job, at least.

I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I was doing it: I scribbled a few lines down to a scratch track in my head (undoubtedly influenced by Gillian Welch, Buddy Miller, and the like), stumbled into the rhymes, and found my way to the punchline at the end: “Sometimes to move ahead / We’ve got to turn our back.” When I got home and picked up the guitar, the chords and tune tumbled out, pretty much fully formed. And that’s the way I’ve written nearly all my songs ever since.

My wife Michelle and I (and an old coworker named Mitch, who I’ve sadly lost track of) played this and other songs at some local coffee shops and whatnot in the Chattanooga TN area. Then we had more babies and other life stuff happened, so making music and playing out went dormant for a while. I wrote a lot of songs about my adopted hometown, and that became a pattern, as I still write songs about where I’m living.

Along the way this song has stayed around when so many others have faded. You can hear the latest renditions of it with my band sparrow. And I loved singing it with “Whiskey Priest” the band I started with my friends in Vermont:

When I wrote this simple song I had no way of knowing this would be a theme of my life: building, tearing down, and moving on to start the cycle again. Moving from Tennessee to Maine to pursue a dream career. Facing all sorts of setbacks and joys and changing plans and finding our way to Massachusetts for grad school, Vermont for my dream job, and then back to Maine when that ended all to soon and we needed another new start. The cycle that seems baked into the fabric of the universe: life, death, resurrection.

Apparently when you write a song, it is writing you too.