Sarah Jarosz / Follow Me Down / 2011
Run Away
dreamy, hushed, urgent longing
A hushed invitation to elope into the natural dark, this song builds its romance almost entirely out of pastoral imagery and nighttime secrecy. It's less a story than a mood-piece, repeating its central plea until escape and intimacy become the same gesture.
forbidden or secret love escape/flight from society nature as refuge youthful urgency freedom through intimacy
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses a lover directly, urging them toward a shared escape; the address is intimate and pleading, with no indication of resistance from the other party, so the voice reads as sincere rather than unreliable.
What happens
The song moves from a call to leave, through images of buried and restored feeling, to a final scene of quiet consummation by a river, without ever specifying what the couple is escaping from — the movement is emotional and spatial rather than plotted.
How it's built
Three verses alternate with a short, unchanging chorus, and the repetition of the chorus's plea works less as development than as incantation — each verse adds a new pastoral tableau while the chorus keeps pulling the song back to the same held breath of secrecy.
Craft
- pastoral imagery
- Cotton fields, willow trees, moonlight, and riverside settings root the escape in an idealized rural landscape, making 'nature' function as the space where secrecy and freedom are possible.
- anaphora
- The repeated phrasing of the escape refrain across verses and chorus reinforces urgency and turns the wish into something closer to a spell.
- metaphor
- Burying the heart in a tree and having it returned figures emotional withdrawal and vulnerability as literal objects hidden in the landscape, tying inner feeling to the outer natural world.
- nocturnal imagery
- Recurring references to night, shadow, and stars align the lovers' secrecy with darkness itself, suggesting concealment is not shameful but sacred.
Reading it
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Context
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Listen for
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About Sarah Jarosz
Sarah Ellen Jarosz is an American singer-songwriter from Wimberley, Texas. Her debut studio album, Song Up in Her Head, was released in 2009 on Sugar Hill Records and the track "Mansinneedof" was nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of Best Country Instrumental Performance.
b. 1991 / United States
Full biography and catalogue