It's been almost four weeks since the last thunderstorm, and while the next one is constantly being postponed by a few more days in the weather forecast, a wait-and-see ritual has set in almost automatically: Every evening's cooking begins with "Riders on the Storm" as soundtrack.

It pebbles and thuds, hisses, hisses and cracks: a musical evocation of the rain that all life needs so urgently, and which on the other hand can also be dangerous.

Jan Wiele

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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It is probably one of the most meditative pop songs par excellence, based on great weather drama and also performing this musically.

However, the thunderstorm seems less threatening than lulling, from the first bars it is clear to the listener that he is at the mercy of this superiority anyway and has to submit.

You can also drive, drink, smoke, write or do something else: most likely with the effect that this activity is ennobled, overlaid with a diffuse, possibly deceptive sense of meaning or at least of doing exactly the right thing at this very moment ( and what could be better than that?).

For example: cut vegetables in the quadruple beat of the song that begins.

Cut, cut, cut cut.

Then get inspired by the looping quaver runs of bass and drums to chop the onions twice as quickly: tack-tock, tack-tock, tack-tock, tack-tock.

And when the sixteenths of Ray Manzarek's rain piano run roll down from the sky, perhaps the first tremors begin: ecstasy before Jim Morrison has even sung a word.

Riders on the storm


Riders on the storm


Into this house we're born


Into this world we're thrown


Like a dog without a bone


An actor out on loan


Riders on the storm

Do you need big explanations about being thrown in the indie world?

About theatrical and dog metaphors of existence?

No, it's all self-explanatory the moment you first hear it, everyone understands.

But it might be interesting to know where it came from: Supposedly the Doors played around with Stan Jones' country classic "Ghost Riders in the Sky" (Yippie-ai-eh...) while recording their album "LA Woman", and then a new one song was created.

From afar, the former still shimmers through.

The drastic slowing down of the new song compared to the galloping Geisterreiter template is almost amusing at first in view of a band that in the collective memory is associated with intoxicated trance experiences like hardly any other.

But the speed ecstasy is not in the song tempo here,

The lyrics seem as if they were assembled from very different notebooks of what is often rumored to be the huge text reservoir of Jim Morisson, who saw himself primarily as a writer, even if perhaps not everyone in the world wanted to see it that way.

The big win of "Riders on the Storm" is the maximum compression.

It's basically just three stanzas of text with very different themes.

The existential first verse is followed by one that takes the song to the streets like a report:

There's a killer on the road


His brain is squirmin' like a toad


Take a long holiday


Let your children play


If you give this man a ride


Sweet family will die


killer on the road, yeah

Much has already been read into these lines – perhaps rightly so.

According to Stephen Davis' Morisson biography, the singer worked through childhood memories - of a time when he was studying at the University of Tallahassee in Florida, but his then girlfriend lived in Clearwater, almost three hundred miles away.

So Morisson often hitched to her, and the lonely highways inspired him - "on fire with lust and poetry and Nietzsche and God knows what else - taking chances on redneck truckers, fugitive homos, and predatory cruisers".