6. Eleanor, It's Raining Now
from the Lost Dogs album "Little Red Riding Hood"
Words & Music by Terry Taylor
©1993 B-1 Music/Chenka-Chenka Music/Word Music (ASCAP)

Note:
“Eleanor” has elicited more listeners questions in regard to its “meaning” than perhaps any other song in my repertoire. Purposefully enigmatic, Eleanor’s mysteries, metaphors, and melancholic minor-key arrangement are elements which, to me, best serve the purpose of the somewhat strange and dark tale being told. My original intention was to simply write a modern day myth which incorporated elements of the story of the fall of Adam and Eve. Naturally, as I progressed, new images were formed and incorporated into the song which served to heighten its peculiarities, along with the sense of foreboding, loss, and despair I felt were necessary to the narrative. Eleanor is essentially a tragic love story, set in the present, with images that recall the timeless truths concerning our own brokenness via Mankind’s original fall from grace.
There is no significance in my choice of the name “Eleanor”; I chose it simply because it has, at least for me, a kind of beautiful and poetic quality to it, yet one that is also mysterious and dark; I felt the name fit the song perfectly. It might well be that, while writing Eleanor, I was subconsciously thinking of Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Raven” which possessed the same kind of supernatural, somewhat victorian, atmosphere I was attempting to create, and although the referenced lover in Poe’s poem is named “Lenore,” (a slight variation) this may well have influenced my choice of the name. As a child, I considered “The Raven,” with its incremental increases in franticness, and a growing sense of dread, to be among my favorite poems; Perhaps, without being aware of it, I was projecting Poe’s poetic lamentation onto my own work. There's also the Turtles song "Elenore", which I love and a poem by Annie Dillard called "Eleanor At The Office" which inspired some of the cryptic imagery in "Tracking The Amorous Man" from the Kalhoun!album. Heck, it's a cool name! I dig it, OK?
As I recollect, "Eleanor" was the very first song I showed the guys in The Lost Dogs during the first day of rehearsal for what would become the Little Red Riding Hood album. Hearing the recording of Eleanor even today, I’m blown away by the pitch-perfect arrangement and feel of it; I can’t stress strongly enough how much the individual contributions of each one of my fellow Dogs not only created a soundscape perfectly suited to my vision for the song, but transcended even that; taking it to a deeper, richer, and even more emotionally charged place. Mike Roe’s sublimely apropos “weeping” guitar part at the end of Eleanor still gives me chills, not only because of its flawless execution, but as a further confirmation of just how amazingly perceptive and adept my friends were and are in capturing the essence of the kind of emotionally complex narrative found in a song like “Eleanor.” I’ve been truly blessed to have worked with these amazing musicians and dear friends.
The version of Eleanor here takes elements of my original acoustic version of the song and melds them with a few of the guitar melodies and backing vocals which emerged during the process of rehearsing and recording Little Red.