Kris Kristofferson / Border Lord / 1972
Gettin' By, High and Strange
wry, weary restlessness dressed up as freedom
A restless travelogue of a song in which the narrator treats geography as therapy, moving from city to city to outrun whatever is unraveling inside him. It's less a story than a mantra for evasion, set to a loose, talking-blues shuffle that mimics the drift it describes.
restlessness and evasion self-medication rootlessness as identity impermanence of place survival through motion
Who's speaking
First-person narrator addressing no one in particular, essentially thinking out loud to himself; the voice is casual and self-aware but not fully trustworthy about how well he's actually doing
What happens
The song opens with a move from one coast to another framed as recovery, then generalizes that pattern into a whole philosophy: newness itself is the cure, or at least the anesthetic. By the final repetitions there's no more plot, just the chant of the refrain, suggesting the narrator has stopped narrating his life and started merely repeating its rhythm.
How it's built
Loose verse-into-refrain structure with almost no bridge or turn; the second verse mostly restates the first's logic rather than developing it, and the song dissolves into an instrumental vamp on the refrain, formally enacting the aimlessness it describes.
Section by section
Opening verse
“patchin' up the pieces of my tangled mind”
The narrator frames a cross-country move explicitly as psychological repair work, immediately establishing that his travel is not adventure but damage control.
First refrain
The call-and-response chant turns the narrator's coping strategy into a singable creed, flattening whatever pain prompted the move into something that sounds almost celebratory.
Second verse
“new ain't nothin' but a state of mind”
He generalizes his personal escape into a philosophy, claiming novelty itself can substitute for resolution. It's a rationalization dressed as wisdom, and the song doesn't ask whether it actually works.
Closing lines and vamp
The narrator's stated will to keep going as long as he's physically able reads as both stoic and a little grim, and the song's fade into pure refrain repetition suggests he's no longer thinking his way through anything, just repeating the mantra to keep moving.
Craft
- refrain as thesis statement
- The recurring tagline functions less as a hook than as the narrator's whole worldview compressed into a slogan, repeated until it stops sounding like an insight and starts sounding like a coping mechanism.
- parallelism and list accumulation
- Stacking near-synonymous adverbs and phrases mimics the narrator's indiscriminate appetite for experience, suggesting exhaustion rather than genuine open-mindedness.
- ironic bravado
- The confident, upbeat delivery of a philosophy about running from pain reads as self-deception; the cheerfulness of the tune undercuts the desperation implied by the lyric's content.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a portrait of a man using constant motion and pleasure-seeking to avoid confronting whatever broke him in the first place -- the buoyant music is the mask, not the mood. An alternative reading takes the song more at face value, as a genuine outlaw-country celebration of freedom and appetite, with the drifting lifestyle presented unironically as the point rather than a symptom. The lyric itself doesn't fully resolve which is true, which is part of its effectiveness.
Context
Border Lord (1972) came during a period when Kristofferson was writing frequently about restlessness, dislocation, and the wear of touring and fame; this song fits that period's loose, half-spoken, almost improvised delivery style rather than tight Nashville songcraft. I don't have specific documented context on this song's composition beyond the album era.
Listen for
- the shift from confessional verses into a chanted, almost slogan-like refrain
- how the melody stays upbeat even as the lyric's content turns evasive or weary
- the way repetition increases toward the end, with the refrain taking over from narrative
- the loose, talking-blues phrasing that mimics conversational drift rather than tight songwriting
About Kris Kristofferson
Kristoffer Kristofferson was an American musician, songwriter, and actor. He was a pioneering figure in the outlaw country movement of the 1970s, moving away from the polished Nashville sound and toward a more raw, introspective style.
1936 - 2024 / United States
Full biography and catalogue