Spring 2015
STANTON COUNTY
by
Simon Veasey
Stanton County: What’s it About?
Well I write a lot of songs about people who are disconnected. it may be by choice or by
circumstance but for some reason these characters don’t fit into the “norms” of what we expect in
society today.
Disconnected people I find often get a bad press, but the characters in my songs don’t tend to
be trouble, they may drink a lot, use drugs, be occasionally violent and be unlucky in love, but in
reality they are probably not that much different than the rest of us.
I’ve never been to Stanton County, in fact there are a few Stanton Counties in the United States,
but for some reason the name just stuck in my head and rattled around for a about a week with the
vision of one of those single street “drive in, drive out” towns with plenty of space all the way around it.
Stanton County is nowhere in particular it could be England, Ireland, America, Norway … it
doesn’t matter it's anywhere where a couple of lonely people collide and become less lonely even if
it's just for a few hours … usually over a couple, or too many drinks.
Two or three attempts at this song fell by the wayside, and I can’t honestly tell you now whether
this version contains any of the original material, like most writers I probably have thousands of
words scribbled onto pads and in notebooks that will someday, or never, be recycled into something
that people actually read.
Stanton is a simple song with a simple story in fact I’m not sure it is a story it feels more of an
observation … anyway it goes like this …
Pretty girl turns up with the dust in a beat up old ‘70s convertible into a town that has little
going for it. Our storyteller has landed there as well he’s doing nothing much but playing a bit of
guitar and working the door of the only bar in town. She gets a job dancing the pole, he works the
door, they are the last ones there at the end of the night and he ends up walking her home.
This happens every night through the summer but I had this feeling that nothing was ever going
The Linnet's Wings