Enjoy Wishbone on your favorite streaming services! The Campfire Version of this song was picked up by the Mellow Folk playlist and the the main version can be found on the Soft & Soothing Sounds playlist.
This track sounds like a love song, but it’s not a love song. It sounds like it’s about a girl, but it’s not about a girl. This song is a true story about a tenacious spider that I met when I lived in Poughkeepsie, NY.
This spider had spun an enormous, beautiful web that was unfortunately anchored between the side of my house and the side of my car. I felt awful about it, but had to drive away, which ripped the web down.
The next day, when I left for work again, the spider had built another huge web in the same place it had done before. But of course I had to get to work again, and ripped it in half again to do so.
The fact that it had built the same web again really stuck with me, so much so that I wrote a short story about it and called the spider Wishbone after the way we used to make wishes splitting the furcula of a chicken or turkey when I was a kid.
Fast forward to October 2023 and another Big City Folk Song Club challenge came along. The challenge word was spiderweb which was chosen because of the halloween decorations that were up at the Vale Public House that day.
That song prompt reminded me of the spider, and the lyrics to the song came easily after that.
While we did not have a collaborator for this track, Ryan did bring a tongue drum to our recording session that we used for this song.
It wasn’t tuned to the right key, but the scale overlapped enough with the key of G that we were able to pull six notes from it (E-A, B-D, D-G, where the D’s are an octave apart). It sounds kind of like fancy doorbell.
You can see me fumbling around and figuring out the notes here. Ryan has better rhythm and control of the mallets though, so he performed the recording.
The lyric goes, I used to call her Wishbone, no I never knew her name. You might say that the ringing of the tongue drum is the spider’s real name…
I’ll leave things off with this clip that DistroKid made for me. They have this feature that drops your song into a famous-ish movie scene, so I gave it a shot with Wishbone and the results had me howling with laughter. It’s so bad that it’s great.