Inspired by Native American history, fiction, and way of life. This tragic, joyous, haunting thematic album is dearest to my heart. Acoustic rhythm and electric lead guitar, vocals, keyboards, drums and strings. It was available on cassette in the early 2000's. When the Red Lake Indian reservation murders occurred in 2005 I was inspired to release it on CD. A world, so beautiful and mystical, is marred and disfigured by hate, arrogance, greed and diabolic brutality, that finally comes full circle with wisdom and healing gained.
As a sophomore in high school in 1977, the book When The Legends Die, by Hal Borland was required reading. It inspired the statement in the liner notes, "sometimes fiction is truer than truth". This book solidified and brought to the surface something from my depths and changed the direction of my life. It set me on a path of reading countless books of Native American history and fiction. On the subject of the Massacre at Wounded Knee, I read 4 or 5 different books. Much of this study occurred after I moved to Cook County Mn in 1982. At that time the Grand Marais library had many many shelves of books on the subject of Native American life: historical accounts, biographies, autobiographies, and fiction. All this study inspired songs that seemed prewritten, like gifts from another world. The bulk of the songs on this album share this quality and I had little to do with them other than tweaking the words. That is why they are particularly dear to me. My choice was to read books, not write songs about it. When the song Little Tree came to me during a vision quest in the late 1990's I knew the album was nearly completely written.
Much could be written about this album, perhaps a book. It is inextricably intertwined with my life and major decisions, truly dear to my heart in inspiration and circumstance. Though the CD was published in 2005, the bulk of it was recorded in 1999 during a visit to my parents home. In the bedroom I grew up in, using performance mics, borrowing my brother's Les Paul guitar and amp, and my sister's keyboard, I recorded twelve of the numbers in an emotional outpouring fed by recent intense personal failures - fertile ground in which to record these special songs. Two others, Margay Cat and Take My Knife, were recorded earlier with Leah Thomas in her house during a frigid cold spell in late December 1995. Subsequently, the original four track cassette masters for The Long Wait, recorded in the 1999 sessions, were lost so I re-recorded that song digitally in 2002.
The song Infinite Dream, which, as a teenager I had originally named Native American Dream, was written on piano in 1975 around the same time that an 8th grade Native American school mate of mine had showed me a book, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, quoting from it passages of extreme brutality. Perhaps that can be called the official beginning of writing the album When The Legends Die, but it goes back earlier. I remember in 1970 or so, in early elementary school, being taught about the early white arrivals to this continent. The residue that remained in my young mind from these history lessons was not what the curriculum intended, for it was obvious to me that the Indians belonged to the land, and were very cool, that their way of living was vastly desirable, while the European immigrants came off as alien buffoons. Even then, my young mind was repulsed by a culture that wasn't attuned to its environment, seemed dead set on avoiding that environment - their own mother - out of fear.
As I write these words on December 28 2025, now at the age of 64 I still feel the same, and am so utterly thankful that truth can so easily filter through the whitewashing of history. It gives me hope
credits:
Joe Paulik - vocals, 12 & 6 string acoustic guitars, electric guitar, piano & keyboards, drum on Margay Cat; synthesized drums
Leah Thomas - vocals, keyboards and accordion on Take My Knife; shakers on Margay Cat.
Handwritten text by Joe Paulik
CD graphics and design by Laurie Sugiarto
Painting credits: please see page two of booklet above
Written by Joe Paulik except Take My Knife (lyrics Leah Thomas/music from the traditional Connemara Rose)
Recorded and engineered by Joe Paulik in January 1999 on four track cassette except:
Margay Cat and Take My Knife winter 1995 on four track cassette; The Long Wait: winter 2002 digital Roland
running time: 66:39.