Michael Hurley / Watertower / 1988
I Paint a Design
wry, weathered, gently melancholic
Michael Hurley casts himself as an itinerant sign-painter and decorator-for-hire, using the trade as a loose metaphor for his own vocation as an artist who can render almost anything except the things that matter most. The song ambles through a string of half-told anecdotes — a woman's glance, an earthquake, a vanished lover — each one circling back to the painter's refrain and his admission that some experiences resist representation.
the limits of art itinerant labor and craft unrequited or fading love mortality and disaster folk-outsider identity
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator speaking directly to an unnamed customer or patron ('mister'), presenting himself as a working painter; the voice is plainspoken and self-deprecating, mixing boastful craft-talk with quiet confessions of failure.
What happens
The song doesn't tell a single story so much as accumulate loosely connected vignettes tied together by the painter's refrain. He starts by advertising his skill — horses, dragons, wedding decorations — then drifts into reflections on his itinerant working life, a woman's unforgettable look, a real-world disaster (the LA earthquake), and a vanished 'crazy' lover. Each verse ends by admitting some experience — mercy, a breaking heart — can't actually be painted, undercutting the confident sales pitch of the chorus.
How it's built
Simple verse-chorus folk structure with a fixed, repeated chorus functioning almost like a trade jingle. The verses are loosely rhymed, conversational, and nearly plotless, giving the song a rambling, talking-blues feel; the recurring chorus acts as a refrain that both sells the narrator's craft and ironizes it each time it returns after a verse that reveals what he can't paint.
Section by section
Opening chorus
The song opens like a tradesman's pitch, listing decorative flourishes he can paint. The tone is proud but slightly absurd — dragons and horses for a wedding — establishing the narrator as a folk-art huckster figure.6
First verse
He shifts to describing his working life as itinerant and possibly declining, noting that the kind of women he prefers won't demand things of him.Lordy closes it with a worn, resigned exclamation typical of old-time song phrasing.
Second verse
He recalls a woman's look that struck him as the sweetest thing he's known, then admits an inability to render something intangible.1.4oz of weight is given by that turn.,
Earthquake verse
“Back when they had that LA”
A sudden historical reference breaks the song's domestic focus, placing the narrator as witness to disaster. He claims he can paint the physical collapse of infrastructure but, in a pivot, says he can capture a breaking heart too — complicating the song's earlier claims of artistic limitation.
Final verse
The 'crazy mama' verse returns to personal loss, describing a woman who once followed him but whose connection faded untraceably, reinforcing the song's undertone of transience and things that can't be held onto or depicted.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- Painting and sign-work stand in for artistic and emotional expression broadly; the narrator's literal trade becomes a way of talking about what can and cannot be captured in art.
- refrain as ironic counterpoint
- The cheerful, salesman-like chorus repeats unchanged while the verses grow more wistful, so each repetition reads a little more hollow against the surrounding confessions.
- juxtaposition
- Mundane trade boasts (dragons, white horses, wedding decor) sit beside references to real catastrophe and personal loss, flattening the distance between craft and catastrophe, commerce and heartbreak.
- colloquial diction
- Plainspoken, slightly broken syntax and folksy exclamations give the song an oral, storytelling quality consistent with talking-blues tradition.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a meditation on the gap between craft and feeling: the narrator can render dragons, horses, bridges, even earthquakes, but mercy, love, and heartbreak resist his brush — except, strikingly, in the earthquake verse where he claims he *can* paint a breaking heart, suggesting disaster and heartbreak are the one subject vivid enough to be captured. An alternative, lighter reading is that the song is simply a loose, picaresque self-portrait of Hurley-as-sign-painter, stringing together memories and boasts without much thematic unity, in keeping with his famously digressive, cartoonish songwriting style.
Context
Michael Hurley was himself a visual artist and cartoonist as well as a musician, so the painter persona here likely draws directly on his own life rather than being purely fictional. Watertower (1988) comes from a mature period of his career marked by loose, homespun, often humorous folk-blues songwriting. I have no specific documented backstory for this song beyond what the lyric itself suggests.
Listen for
- the deadpan repetition of the chorus and how its tone shifts against each verse
- the offhand mention of the real LA earthquake amid otherwise personal, anecdotal verses
- the way minor-key or blues inflections (if present) underscore the admissions of artistic limitation
- Hurley's loose, talking-blues phrasing and how it mimics casual speech rather than formal song structure
About Michael Hurley
Michael Hurley was an American folk singer-songwriter who was a part of the Greenwich Village folk music scene of the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to playing a wide variety of instruments, Hurley was also a cartoonist and a painter.
1941 - 2025 / Astoria
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