Townes Van Zandt / High, Low and in Between / 1969
To Live Is to Fly
wistful, resigned but tender
A traveling songwriter's meditation on impermanence, love without possession, and the necessity of moving on, framed as both a farewell to friends and a philosophy of living light. The tone is weary but affirming, treating restlessness itself as a form of grace.
impermanence itinerant life love without attachment time and mortality artistic vocation acceptance of loss
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator speaking partly to a lover and partly to friends he's leaving; he is candid about his own unreliability and treats his rootlessness as fact rather than apology, making him sympathetic but not entirely trustworthy as a partner.
What happens
The song opens with a qualified declaration to a lover, refusing conventional vows while still promising fidelity of a stripped-down kind. It moves into general reflections on time, memory, and the balance between plenty and want, before pivoting to a direct goodbye to friends and the musical community the narrator is leaving. It closes by universalizing the situation: everyone must fill their own emptiness and choose how to spend their time, with flight — literal and metaphorical — offered as the answer.
How it's built
Loose verse structure alternating between intimate address and aphoristic generalization, tied together by a refrain that functions as thesis statement. The refrain's plainness contrasts with the more oblique, proverb-like verses, giving the song a call-and-response rhythm between concrete address and abstract wisdom.
Section by section
Opening verse
The narrator withholds the expected vocabulary of romance, replacing declarations of love and need with a vaguer promise of pursuit and non-betrayal. This sets up the song's central tension: intimacy without permanence.n
First reflection on time
“living's mostly wasting time”
A flat, almost nihilistic claim about existence is immediately softened by the narrator's admission that he too squanders his days, making the observation feel earned rather than cynical.
Sky and earth couplet
The pairing of talk and lying down evokes both companionship and impermanence — conversation as ephemeral as weather, contact as grounded as soil, suggesting a relationship built on presence rather than plans.
Days like rain
Time is rendered as rhythmic and uncontrollable, arriving in patterns like percussion. Memory becomes selective, framed as instinct rather than choice, reinforcing the album's broader theme of drifting rather than steering.
Refrain
The chorus reframes both hardship and ease as necessary parts of motion, urging the listener to wake and continue rather than dwell, functioning as the emotional pivot of the song.
Farewell to friends
“time to go again”
The goodbye is treated as routine, almost ritualistic, underscoring a life defined by repeated departures rather than a single dramatic break.
Musical imagery
References to sound quality and craft position the departure specifically as an artist's choice, tying the wandering life to the pursuit and collection of new music rather than mere escapism.
Closing generalization
“we all got holes to fill”
The song widens from personal confession to universal claim, suggesting emptiness is a shared condition and that different people fill it through different means — travel, risk, or steady labor.
Final refrain
The repetition with a slight variation, replacing sleep with tears, subtly acknowledges grief within the same call to keep moving, ending the song on bittersweet resolve rather than pure liberation.
Craft
- refrain as thesis
- The recurring flight image functions less as a hook than as a summary argument, restated with slight variation to suggest an idea worth returning to rather than escaping from.
- paradox
- Statements pairing opposites — too much and not enough, low and high — resist tidy resolution, mirroring the song's refusal to settle into one emotional register.
- extended metaphor of flight
- Wings, dust, and sleep in the eyes turn travel and change into an image of waking flight, suggesting renewal rather than mere departure.
- folk aphorism
- Several lines function as freestanding proverbs about time and holes to fill, giving the song a timeless, almost oral-tradition quality distinct from confessional songwriting.
Reading it
Most readings treat this as Van Zandt's clearest statement of his itinerant ethos: love and friendship matter, but they cannot anchor him against the pull of the road and the work of songwriting. An alternative reading hears it as a meditation on mortality more than travel — the flight and dust imagery gesturing toward death or transience of life itself, with the farewell to friends read as more final than a simple parting. Both readings coexist without contradiction; the song's ambiguity between literal travel and existential departure seems intentional.
Context
Recorded for High, Low and in Between in 1969, a period when Van Zandt was earning a reputation as a restless, itinerant performer. The song is frequently cited among his most personal statements, though as with much of his catalog, biographical specifics behind individual lines are unconfirmed.
Listen for
- the shift in tone between the intimate opening address and the more proverbial middle verses
- how the refrain's melody rises on 'high' and 'low' to mirror the lyric's imagery
- the parallel between the farewell to a lover and the farewell to friends
- the way percussion or rhythm in the recording underscores the 'rain on a drum' image
About Townes Van Zandt
John Townes Van Zandt was an American singer-songwriter. He wrote numerous songs, such as "Pancho and Lefty", "If I Needed You", "Snake Mountain Blues", "Our Mother the Mountain", "Waitin' Round to Die", and "To Live's to Fly".
1944 - 1997 / United States
Full biography and catalogue